I am Super Excited about my Project

I've spent almost a week now thinking about my first project, and I have a fairly solid design concept. I've also selected my wood. I'm building a jewelry cabinet out of madrone, which is local to northern California. The idea is that the cabinet will be elegant and subtle--a place to showcase jewelry. The collection it houses is meant to be small, well-organized and well-loved. A woman (or man) will be able to see her (or his) favorite pieces neatly displayed in a single glance. No clutter or junk.
 
College of the Redwoods presents a way of working that's new to me. Rather than execute a rigid idea, your design, function of the piece and the wood play off each other in a fluid process. The project evolves as you work through each step. It's liberating to work this way, but also unnerving when uncertainty strikes.

I originally set out to make a cabinet with a solid, coopered (slightly curved) door, but I found the perfect piece of madrone...well, perfect except that it isn't quite wide enough and it's maybe a little too subtle. This gave me the idea to do a frame-and-panel door instead. The panel will be a showy piece of redwood burl, and it will be offset to one side. After cutting into my madrone, however, I realized that there's a lot more color and grain graphics in the wood than I had originally anticipated. Now I'm back to decisions about the design and use of the wood. Do I want to go ahead with the frame-and-panel, which is a cool concept but detracts from the madrone? Or do I want to showcase the more subtle (but not too subtle) beauty of the madrone?

Here are pictures of my wood in various stages and a drawing of my cabinet design. I'm also throwing in a random picture of tonight's sunset over the dunes. The sky was beautiful, and there was even a rainbow!

    

Breakthrough

I was finally able to wrap-up the exercises that were preventing me from moving on to my first project. Yesterday I completed my coopered door, half-blind dovetails and through-wedged mortise and tenon. Here's a photo of the three trouble makers.

It's hard to tell from the photo, but the tall board of wood is slightly curved, or coopered (like a wine barrel, which is where the term comes from). It started as a solid piece of wood. I cut it into four pieces, took some material off of each edge, glued them back together into an arc, and then used the coopering plane I built to scoop out the insides into a smooth curve. 

Now that I'm done with my exercises, I've moved on to my first project. I'm still very much in the idea phase, but look for more to come soon!