Recent Projects

Haven't had anything in particular to post this past week, so I thought I'd share a couple projects that I finished and delivered in early August.

I had promised to make something for Sarah and Josh as part of their wedding present. I asked them to give me some suggestions. They mentioned that they had received three decorative serving plates, shaped like leaves,  as a wedding gift from someone else, and they didn't know how to display them. I thought about various shelves, but they all seemed too ordinary and not very special. Eventually, I came upon the idea of using a piece of burl or a wood slab somehow. There are places that sell slabs and burl, usually cut as cross sections of tree trunks. Many have highly figured grain and are used for such things as gun stocks, clocks or clock faces, or, if you can find bookend pieces (slabs that were adjacent to each other on the tree), small end table tops. I ordered a walnut slab from a shop in Webster City, IA, cleaned it up, and installed some walnut supports on it for the plates. Here is the final product, nearly a year after their wedding! Sarah and Josh seemed pleased with the results. This was a fairly different kind of project for me, maybe closer to art work than carpentry. My sister, the artist, liked it, so that made me feel a little glow.

Around the same time, I finished up a high chair for granddaughter Maia. This is actually the second one of these I have made, the first being for Eleanor. Hers was made of rock maple, and this one is oak. I let the UPS Store package and ship it to Maia for me.

It arrived safely in Nashville, and so here is Maia giving it a test drive. Actually, the color of the chair in this picture is more accurate than the one above (too much flash!). She seems surprised that her grandpa could actually do something like this. Sometimes her grandpa is too.