Woodworking is a useful skill for everything from furniture, construction, toys and seasonal displays. There are simple projects for the complete beginner, as well as complex plans for ornate designs. Before you get started, it may be helpful to acquire some woodworking tools, set up your workshop, and start with some easy projects.

Some basic tools may include a chisel, jigsaw, lathe, saw, bradawl, gimlet, drill, gauges, hammer, sand paper, set square, screw, bevel, etc. A chisel is a tool with a characteristically shaped cutting edge (such that wood chisels have lent part of their name to a particular grind) of blade on its end, for carving and/or cutting a hard material such as wood, stone, or metal. A jigsaw is a tool used for cutting arbitrary curves, such as stencilled designs or other custom shapes, into a piece of wood or similar material. It is usually used in a more artistic fashion than other saws, which only cut in straight lines and exist mainly to cut pieces of wood to length for building structure. In this way, it is similar to the rasp and the chisel. A lathe is a machine tool which spins a block of material to perform various operations such as cutting, sanding, knurling, drilling, or deformation with tools that are applied to the workpiece to create an object which has symmetry about an axis of rotation.