Project Parade

The last 10 days have been a whirlwind of activity in and out of the shop ... We finished up several projects that have been in the works for a while, started and finished a few new ones, and I have generally been too busy to write much about them individually. It just poured and Bill L and I canceled our golf date, so I'm taking a minute to try and get some stuff down here ... Lots to see .... Click the pictures to enlarge them ...

We completed the last of the trim and returns on the walnut paneled room a week ago Thursday

Yesterday I took some furniture to Brattleboro for an upcoming show by the Guild of Vermont Furnituremakers at Gallery 2, Vermont Artisans Designs on Main Street there. I had a nice curly redwood console table that Sam, Jim and I whipped up last week, a piece for Steve Holman, of Holman Studios and a desk and a bed for Bill Laberge. In all, I think there will be over twenty pieces representing the work of members of the guild. The show opens next Friday ... more on that later.

Furniture and Fine Art ... good combo

A week ago Friday I finished the slate on the first side of the roof of our new woodshed ...

This past week we made and gilded a frame for a giclee of an NC Wyeth painting. Will, and Anne, (of Wood and Signs), did the gilding and it will go to The Image Loft in Manchester for John Conte to install the painting, maybe tomorrow ... We made a similar frame for the same print last year for this client's brother ...

Discovered (after a visit by a friend who works at the Met) that it's possible a chest we have been doing some cleaning and restoration work on (post fire) may have been in the client's family for over 300 YEARS !! Unbelievable !

Finished the cockatoo chairs ... delivery to Boston Tuesday

Flock of cockatoos on the bench .. Painting by Sam ...

Finished a recycled chestnut dressing table, bench and tilting mirror for the walnut room client. The mirror was unable to attend for the photo ...

Cut one of the big walnut slabs to make a wall mounted console

More on this piece later

Finished the zebra wood tables ... sweet!

Finished the custom bookcase and delivered it

Will and I made some progress on our banjos ... (Previous post)

Fretboard and peghead next

And started work on 4 lounge and 2 rocking chairs for a porch in Newton ...

Five (not so) Easy Pieces

This week we finished up five pieces that have been in the works for quite a while. Four of them are for one client, and they will be delivered to New York City this week. The desk was for other clients on Long Island and it will be delivered the week of the 17th. All were complex and challenging pieces involving veneers, custom fabricated metal work, both steel and brass, and complicated design details. They are all, coincidentally, heavily influenced by the historic Art Deco Design Style. Three are fabricated from wenge, hickory and steel and will reside in the same room, the zebrawood table is for the same clients but will be in a different room and the curly maple desk is for a completely different, but also, long time client. The desk is a design collaboration with the interior designer Judith Stutt of Weston, VT.

This zebrawood table posed all kinds of challenges, from resawing the veneers and selecting which ones to use where, the order of steps in the veneering process, fabricating and attaching the brass feet and little 3/8" moldings on the legs, the double curving veneered aprons, and matching the 'waterfall' veneers as they wrapped around the corners. That last step invovlved cutting and labeling the veneers as they came off the flitch. Nicely executed by Jeremy Russell.

This desk had numerous challenges including working with thin curly maple veneer, multiple forms for the drawer boxes and fronts, jigs for cutting the ebony lines on the top and drawer face edges, the diamond shaped side inlays, the curved drawer box joinery, etc., etc.

For the drawers, because the fronts were curved on a smallish raidus , we had to create a new joinery system as the short grain of the dovetails on the curved wood did not have enough integrity. Mark came up with an angled dowel joint that was relatively easy to execute using a jig he made on the drill press. This joint proved to be very strong on our test pieces and while it's not our usual crispy dovetails, it's an attractive joint and in the long run, certainly as strong.

See pictures of this joinery process on the "Curved drawer front joint" post.