Greetings! This is a kitchen cabinet building week. The countertop is done and now it’s time for the base—a plywood box with an Ash face frame. I don’t have much experience with plywood so am looking forward to the project. The Ash comes from my clients’ land; they asked me to make this cabinet using this wood because they want their house to reflect their values. Connected to the land. Supporting local craftspeople (that’s me!). I feel lucky to get to do this work, grateful to the people who ask me to make them furniture, humbled that my hands will help build a piece of their home.
You know what else I’m grateful for? You. Thanks for being here.
A few items from my shop
You know some about why I woodwork and how and what I’m learning, what I think about during the many hours I’m in the shop, traveling to or from the shop, or fixing up the shop.
Have I written much about why I make the things I do? I don’t think so. The commissions are easy enough to explain: I make them because people I like ask me to. All my commissions so far have been word of mouth and so have generally come from people I know.
Then there’s what our family needs, requests from the adorable and patient Josiah, who never complains when it takes me months to get to something.
The final category is the small stuff I make to sell, either on my website or in a local store. These are the items that come out of my raccoon-like scarpering of scraps from Dad’s lumber piles. Sometimes it’s to learn or practice techniques, sometimes it’s to satisfy curiosity, sometimes it’s to prove that a scrap isn’t firewood after all. And that’s what I thought I’d share a bit about today.
Cherry Butcher Block
Speaking of that countertop earlier, I made this little guy out of extra Cherry cut offs from other projects because I wanted to practice gluing up strips of wood in advance of making my clients’ 25” x 80” countertop. Getting the pieces to fit tightly entails making sure each is nice and flat along the gluing edges. Which is a practice that requires slowing down, sighting down each side of each piece, and using (in my case) a jointer to ensure flatness.
Black Walnut Book Stand
I made this guy (I’m not sure why these items are gendered or male) from a cut off of a log Dad had in his barn. He’d sawn the original tree and had this bit left over. It’s not exactly something we could use in furniture, but I loved its shape and size. It looks like a stout little bird. With no feet. Or maybe the feet are tucked up under it.
The piece was already cut at about a 60-degree angle, and it make me think that it could work as a book stand. All it needed was a small shelf and some brackets to hold open pages. After I made this one, I ended up using a Cherry burl (which I mentioned earlier) to make a bigger version, cutting it at that same 60-degree angle.
Black Walnut Tray
So I’ve been making charcuterie boards since last year (got the idea from family) and have been playing around with differently shaped wood, usually Black Walnut, because Dad has a lot of weird pieces of it. This one makes me think of a topographical map of an island. I imagine the lines revealing a sometimes steep, sometimes level climb up a mountain. My main thought was that I wanted to preserve the curves and keep it simple, so I rounded the bottom edges and used a router to cut handholds underneath instead of attaching handles on top.
Cherry Charcuterie Board
There was this nice curved Cherry board from a tree with a bent trunk. Dad and I made two small serving boards from it, this being the non-curved one (the curved one is at the local shop in town). With this, I tried to be mindful about where the center of the circular pattern in the grain ended up. I didn’t want it centered, but did want to capture as much of its outer rings as possible on the length of the board. I like how the middle of the board has this fluffy cloud oval center and the sides have straight grain book-ending it.
The Big Guy
This board sat half-done in my shop for a couple of months. Dad helped me with the rough shaping and routing out the inner tray. And then it sat watching me reproachfully with that cyclops eye as I found many other things to do instead of finish it. Partly it was because I didn’t want to make decisions about what to do with the cracks and the big knot. Partly it was because trying to cut straight edges on the side was tough—I couldn’t seem to hold the board secure enough to the table bed to run it straight through the saw and when I failed a couple of times, I got nervous.
It is hard to leave any project undone. There is an internal tugging back to the work, an uncomfortable pull that can only be alleviated by return and closure. And is there a force equal to this tension? Perhaps for me it is fear of messing up, of screwing up beyond my ability to fix it. To reside in the borderlands between these two is a self-inflicted exile from the land of just getting things done.
The only way out of exile is one step at a time, nose over your toes, careful but not stopping the progression forward. My mom used to say that to me, nose over your toes, when we were hiking down a steep rock or mountain. She was always trying to assure I had good footing beneath me, even if I was petrified of continuing.
So I put epoxy in the tray’s crack (I hate epoxy and try to avoid it, but this seemed the best way to ensure the crack didn’t worsen and would allow for a smooth surface). And I brought the board back over to Dad’s to explain my trouble and he showed me how to cut the sides. And now the Big Guy is done, and I like to imagine that the cyclops eye looks out contentedly.
I hope your projects—be they in the shop or office or home—are going well and you’re getting to enjoy both the journey and the destination of getting things done.