After a minor catastrophe (the last screw broke off while I was attaching the cabinet hangars and I had to bore it out), my jewelry cabinet is done. My completed work didn't give me an immediate sense of joy or relief, rather I felt empty. I've worked on this project singularly for the past three months, and finishing it left a void. After a few days I hung it on the wall, and then my sense of accomplishment kicked in. Seeing my cabinet on the wall gave me a whole new perspective on the piece. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I hope you are too!
Ejler Hjorth-Westh is an instructor at CR. He was a biology teacher in Denmark before coming to the states to build boats, houses and eventually furniture. A few students and I recently ventured out to his shop in Elk to send off a bed he was just completing. He noted that finishing a project can be anti-climatic because you spend months of your life pouring yourself into a piece, and then it's done and shipped to the client's home without ado. I think he was happy to celebrate the completion of the piece with us, and it was great for us to see Ejler's shop and talk about the bed.
The bed is made out of madrone and redwood burl, the same woods I'm using in my cabinet. It has a really cool joint that connects the side rails to the headboard and footboard. The rail has a modified, angled tenon that slides into an angled mortise. A wedge drives the two pieces into a locking fit. You can see the unfinished joint on the bed (it has yet to be shaped and finished) and the dismantled test joint (lying on its side) in the photos below.
In addition to talking about the bed, Ejler showed us his boat and talked about the boat-building class he's offering this spring. The class will build a boat similar to the dory in the picture, only slightly longer to accommodate a three-person crew. How cool would it be to build your own boat?
I went hiking with three friends in the Angelo Coast Range Reserve. The Reserve has changed shape from a hunting and gathering ground for the pre-historic Cahto people, to a homestead for European settlers in the 1880s, to a wilderness resort for wealthy San Franciscans, to a nature respite for a manufacturing family (the Angelos), to a protected reserve owned by The Nature Conservancy and administered by UC Berkeley. Now there are a few research stations and miles upon miles of beautiful trails and incredible trees. We saw madrone (the wood I'm working for my project), bay laurel (incredibly fragrant!), douglas fir, tan oak and black oak. We also saw lizards, giant doves and lots of berry-filled bear poop.
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| Madrone |
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| More madrone |
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| Black oak |
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!
