Announcing the Essential Skills Series: Friday Update
To start, I have an exciting announcement to make, I am starting a new blog series. On top of my Friday Update and my Wednesday articles I will now launch a Monday post titled the Essential Skills series.
The Essential Skills series is written to answer the questions I had when I was first starting out, geared toward beginners who want to get started and elevate their woodworking. The series will come out in topics, starting with the most fundamental, how to find places to go to buy wood and what to do when you are there.
After this initial series I’ll branch off into specifics on making, skill building, and tools. It’s my way of paying it forward to the community with the intention to give the lonely woodworking enthusiast the confidence they need to start their next project.
Along with this announcement, I ask you to go subscribe to my newsletter, which you can do here or at the bottom of this article. I plan to launch it this summer, focusing first on curating these essential skills and sprinkling in some video content to give you all a better behind the scenes look into woodworking.
With the announcements out of the way, lets dive into this week.
One More Small Project
Before I begin the slab dining room table I have one project to complete. It’s a simple panel to be put on a client’s dog crate which I said would be ready in June. Now is June so I need to get it done.
My test piece, an attempt to darken fir while avoiding blotches.
I started by rough cutting and joining the boards, then using some offcuts to practice finishing as I need to match an existing table.
With a few sample stains down I could pick my method do a light sand, and stain. I want this panel to be semi-rustic so I will finish with a durable top coat, but to increase the contrast I smoothed the boards only to rough them up with a wire brush so some stain will darken the grooves and give the wood an aged look.
After an initial dark stain, I lightly sand back to remove some of the stain so I can leave those areas lighter.
That was the plan at least. But it turned out too light and I had to stain again, but this time I laid down a brown stain and dripped in some black, feathering it into the brown on the piece to give more contrast.
Now all that has to dry before I can begin top coating. I plan to use water based poly, which I found out you can add dye to which I could have done to save all those previous steps. Lesson learned and I plan to pick up some dye for future projects.
For now, you’ll have to wait until next week to see the final shots.
Designing
Last weekend I spent time at Skamania lodge for a corporate retreat and in my downtime I took advantage of the solitude to soak in the surrounding inspiration and make some new design sketches.
Designing takes a lot of time. There are so many points to consider. The piece has to be the right scale and all the lines need to flow together in a cohesive, pleasing way. On top of that it’s a skill, to draw, and it requires practice to put to paper what is in your mind.
I’ll share one design and I’m doing so for two reasons.
Before I started my business I woodworked. My work was simple, I was learning and my main method to learn was YouTube. There are great resources out there, but the one that inspired me was not a teaching or skill building video, but a work of art. It was Jen’s Mistake’s lounge chair video. That was the video that made me want to get into YouTube. My first reason for sharing is to share that story.
The second is a promise. This is my commitment to make a chair. Last year I shared a design for the piano roll cabinet and at the time I made a promise to build that cabinet. It took me roughly a year from promise to completion. In that year I built skills which enabled me to make the cabinet and I am now committing to this chair.
A pretty little design in my opinion. It was windy with birds flying and I was inspired to make an airy, winged design.
I am intimidated. Notice the lack of straight lines. This chair will be complex to make and I’m not ready to take it on quite yet. Instead I share this drawing is a promise to make a beautiful chair and an equally beautiful video to go along with it.