What I learned from the chisel

I've said before that I'm not a woodworker.  And I'll say it again: I'm a total novice at this stuff.  I can hack up pieces of wood and join them together in a rough sort of way, but it ain't pretty.  It's more like Frankenstein's monster.

I recently bought a chisel set.  Today I did some chiseling as part of my current project.  I learned three things from today's work:

1.)  Make a chisel cut across the grain first.  Only make parallel-grain cuts between your cross-grain cuts.  The problem with parallel-grain cuts is that they split the wood.

2.)  Start in the middle of your planned hole and work outward.  It's a lot easier to chip way at an edge that it is to drive down into a place far from a hole.

3.)  If you're chiseling all the way through, make some cuts or drill some holes or something on the other side.  If you go in from one direction and try to go all the way, you'll split the wood on the back side.

Those are my newb-learns-the-hard-way lessons for today.