Henley Arts Trail - 30 April to 2 May 2016

Henley Arts Trail is coming end of this month! Come see me at venue 9..... Click on flier for larger view.

Visit to my cousin

What better way to spend Easter weekend than in a workshop? I went to visit my cousin who does woodworking and we spent a lot of time in his lovely workshop. My cousin makes guitars and furniture with the occassional Christmas decoration and a notable project of a ridiculously heavy cutting board commissioned by my husband. (You can read about the cutting board here: https://handguitar.wordpress.com/2015/02/23/a-solid-ebony-chopping-board/) Anyway, so we also made a piece of furniture together: a mini four poster bed for my miniature teddy bears. You can click on all the photos below to see a larger version.

The first thing was to make a plan. We drew out the plan on a piece of wood: (the bed was to be 16cm long, 16cm high and 12cm wide)

This is a photo of my cousin's bench plus looking through the windows at the other half of the workshop.

Once we had all the pieces we needed for the frame of the bed, we clamped them together to see if they fitted properly and to decide what we were going to do with the shape.

My cousin showed me how to saw with various wood saws - quite a bit different than sawing into metal!! You have to take the grain of the wood into consideration and make sure you don't let the saw wander off along the grain instead of along the line you're trying to cut. It was fun to be learning new things! I also got to use a plane, which was also new for me.

We used chisels, including an old chisel that used to belong to our grandfather. My cousin said our grandfather hadn't been particularly kind to the chisel: used it until it was blunt and then used it to mix paint! Ha! But now the chisel is all cleaned up and sharp again, so we used it to make the dips on the sides of the bed and the curved lines on the bed posts which you can see in this photo.

 Here's my cousin using a large planing machine to get a piece of wood thin enough for our purposes.

Once we had the sides and posts, we glued thin strips on the inside of the long sides of the bed for the slats of the bed to rest on later. Otherwise there's no place for the mattress to rest on!

To assemble the bed, we used small brass nails. But because all the wood was quite thin (we didn't want the wood to split), we pre-drilled all the holes and also used wood glue in between all the sections.

 Later, more clamping to make sure the pieces stayed firmly together while the glue dried.

And two photos of the bed once we finished all the fabricating. Now of course I need to make a mini mattress and bedding!

The bears approve.