A year of period furniture
This is what’s happening outside your shop. Invite it in.
Local chapters meet all year. A long-form video interview drops every month. Pins & Tales arrives quarterly. The Annual Conference and the Makers Challenge run once a year, and American Period Furniture — the journal of record — lands in December.
Throughout the year
Chapter Activities
The Society’s twenty-two regional chapters are where most of the year’s actual work happens. Chapters meet throughout the year — some monthly, some quarterly, some on a seasonal rhythm of their own. Format varies: hands-on demonstrations, work-in-progress critiques, visiting-maker sessions, museum and shop field trips, and the ongoing peer review of pieces members are building right now.
Almost every long-time member arrived through a chapter. If you’re considering joining the Society, the chapter nearest to you is the right place to start.
Monthly
Video Interview Series
A monthly long-form conversation with a working maker, a conservator, a curator, or a historian — the kind of conversation you’d have at a bench, recorded so the rest of the Society gets to be in the room.
Past episodes are kept in the Members Desktop alongside the journal archive.
Series page coming soon.
Once a year
Annual Conference
SAPFM’s national gathering — several days of demonstrations, member presentations, side trips to museum collections and historic shops, the Annual Meeting, and the presentation of the Cartouche Award.
Location and timing rotate. Once known informally as the “mid-year,” the Conference now floats spring, summer, or fall depending on the host venue.
Once a year
Phil Lowe Makers Challenge
A friendly annual competition for SAPFM members, named in honor of 2005 Cartouche recipient Phil Lowe. Categories rotate; recent years have showcased member work in carving, joinery, and finishing.
Winners are featured in Pins & Tales and at the Annual Conference.
Past challenges page coming soon.
Open the door.
Join SAPFM and the rhythm starts arriving — chapter meetings, video interviews, the magazine, the journal, the conference, all of it.
Become a Member