| Once upon a time ... (I seem to start a number of my narrations with that don't I? ... Does it indicate a desire to regress to childhood, do you suppose? ... Or maybe I just never progressed beyond that stage developmentally.) Hmmm ... I seem to be repeating myself ... again. So anyway ... one year for Christmas, my mother said she would enjoy getting a new quilt/towel rack as a present. It would replace the most god-awful, ugliest piece of hollow tube construction you've could ever imagine. I wasn't satisfied with the idea of a couple of solid, wooden uprights with a stencil pattern painted onto them, so I fiddled around with some patterns for a while, bought some fine-toothed blades for my saber saw, pulled down my dust mask, and proceeded to turn otherwise useful planks into some rather spindly versions of their former existence. I've been turning them out (sloooowwwwwwwwly) ever since. |
| Step 1. Go down to the workshop in the cellar. With something like this at the bottom of the stairs, you would think that I wouldn't procrastinate. It HELPS, but I still tend to avoid working on projects anyway. More seriously, Step 1 is hanging on the wall to the right of the more interesting bit of goods. That is a fiber-board stencil. That gets taped to a fairly standard 1 x 12 plank, and the pattern is drawn onto the wood. |
| Step 2. Gather the appropriate tools (again). This is going to take a while, so I'm going to need more DVDs. ("Oh, GOD!!! Not that Farscape thing AGAIN!!" the non-Scapers scream with dismay.) More truthfully, making the quilt racks produces HEAPS of sawdust. The DVD player never goes in the cellar when cutting or sanding operations are underway. |
| That's the left overs from cutting away all the portions that are not quilt rack. Mom and Dad, who heat with wood stoves, just love it when I'm building quilt racks. |
| Four quilt racks, eight pieces ... all ready for hand sanding. This is where the fun begins. (Yes, that was sarcasm.) |
| Cross bars, five per rack, cut to size and ready to be run through the router to round off the edges. |
| Before: Ragged edges, angular corners, and if you look closely at the tighter curls you can see where the saw blade has scorched the wood because it was not moving forward. |
| After: Scrolls are starting to look more graceful, burn marks have been worked out, and everything is looking smoother. |
The hand work takes a very long time ... mostly because I procrastinate like blazes. This piece is almost completed and ready for staining. In the background: Not even a travel mug with a lid will keep sawdust out of my coffee, so unless I like to drink fine wood shavings (which I don't) I have to resort to keeping a lid over the top of the mug. I am also allergic to sawdust. It kind of makes woodworking an idiotic hobby ... but I'm nothing if not oblivious to good sense. So I resort to wearing about the highest rated respirator mask available off-the-shelf. (That's the white disk and gray & green bits in the middle of the workbench.) |
| Begin staining. I have managed to lose several pictures, so we're about to just magically jump to the finished product. There isn't anything exciting about gluing these together or coating them with half a dozen layers of urethane anyway. (Urethane because they double as very handy drying racks.) |
Left: Cherry stain on oak, given to a friend as a wedding present. Right: Custom-blended stain on oak, built for imloco2.
| One of my favorites, this was given to my aunt as a welcome home gift after she almost died from a blood infection. |
