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Commemorative Bike Ride Wall Décor

There are some brave women here on the island who get together and travel the tip-to-tip Confederation Trail by bicycle. Last year a customer got me to make a commemorative décor piece as a gift for his wife who made the 273 km journey.

First I used my iPad to make a mock-up of what he wanted on the board. A few design changes followed, including turning the bike logo the other way around, since the women rode from east (right) to west (left).

The brown portion was to represent the trail itself and the customer wanted it to be routed out so that it wasn’t flat like the rest of the board. He also wanted to be able to put two photos, taken on the day, into the piece. Then he decided to have the top portion of the trail end with a post and the starting and ending place names to be painted on the posts which would extend off the top of the board.

The next step was to draw out the revised piece to scale on paper, it’s about 30” x 20”.

I glued together pieces of pine to make up the board including the two small tops of the posts.

On to cutting out the photo areas, I had two 4” x 6” pieces of glass to use so I cut about 1/4” all around smaller than that with my jigsaw.

Then I used my small router to take away the extra 1/4” just deep enough to fit the glass, photo, and a cardboard backing.

I also routed out places for small glass holders on each side of the photos. This is the back of the piece, you can see how the piece of glass will fit in (and not fall through!), then the photo will go in, covered by cardboard:

The front openings are slightly rounded over, this is what it looks like from the front:

Here is the back with a photo in it:

I will continue explaining how I made this piece in my next blog post.

Thanks for reading!

Some Beachy Signs

I am still here working away in my shop everyday. I am hoping my readers from blogspot have switched over with me, please add my site to however you receive blog posts!

Today I am sharing some newer signs and will share some of my larger projects soon.

I use a lot of turquoise colours in my work. We are on an island and there are many tourists here that come for the summer and spend time at the beach. So turquoise seems perfect for a “Beach” sign. I have done both horizontal and vertical stripes which I paint and distress and then paint “Beach” over the top.

Mermaid Framed in Barn Board

I haven’t posted for over three months because I’ve just been too busy. I still am, but felt I should let my readers know I’m still here working away.

This is a mermaid I made months ago from strips of wood. I made a similar mermaid in blues and turquoise last year.  You can see her HERE. Some of these strips are made with napkins glued to the wood, to look painted.

This mermaid was fit into barn board, it was a painstaking process and the whole piece took me over 40 hours to complete. She does not sit flat, purposely made to curve from head to tail, so she sticks out from the barn board more in some places such as her tail and her hand.

This piece measures 30″ x 20″ and was sold a few weeks ago to a man who’s wife had come in to my shop and told him about it. He came back by himself and bought her the mermaid for an anniversary gift!

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Coastal Charm

Coastal Hall Table

I have people coming into my shop looking for furniture so I decided to make a few more pieces. This is a hall or sofa table.

coastal table  
I’m using spindles for the legs. I bought a box of them over five years ago from someone who had leftovers from making a staircase and railings. Although spindles like this are nicely turned, they usually have squared off sections on both the top and the bottom. While I’ve seen people use them for table legs, I find they look awkward with the squared off end on the floor and you would never see a table like that in a furniture store. That all being said I rounded off the corners and made some round disks to add to the bottom of the spindles.
 
As I’ve shown before on this blog, I connect my tables using mortises and tenons, I don’t typically screw the parts together. To make the mortises this time I used my router in my homemade router table. Below you can see on the left is the nozzle for my shop vac, a piece of wood that I use as a “stopper” and the fence that guides the wood so that the router bit is centered on the spindle leg.
 
The next photo shows the leg as it reaches the stop
 
And this is what the top of the leg looks like after the two mortises are put in.
 
The wood for the aprons is thicker than the mortises so I then take some wood off of each side of the apron pieces so that they make tenons that fit in the mortises. I use my table saw for that step. The apron pieces tenons still have to be shortened to fit them even with the top of the legs.
 
 
The legs and aprons were painted white and then distressed and covered with stain, then I put on a clear coat of polyurethane.
For the top I used pieces of wood that were painted different colours ranging from white to dark turquoise. They were then distressed, stained and clear coated.
Underneath I used table clips that fit into slots in the front and back apron pieces. This allows the top to widen or narrow with changing humidity.
 
So, this is my Coastal Table:
 
 
This table is tall, narrow and long, perfect for a hallway or behind a sofa.
31 1/2″ tall x 12″ wide x 37″ long 
 
 
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Proud to be featured for this table at 
funky junk interiors                       
 
and
French Country Cottage
        
 
and 
 
 

Jig?

I just had to share this. I was cleaning up my workshop a bit today… sawdust gets everywhere. I decided to clean out the two cupboards beside my tablesaw where I keep dado blades, wood throat plate inserts, extra push sticks and jigs.

Well I found this.
 
Tape, screw in the middle, an angle cut on the end and about 15″ long!
I have absolutely no idea what it is.
The joys of getting old!
 

Cow Coathooks

I often seem to find myself cutting shapes out of wood. I’ve cut mermaids, lobsters, anchors, whales, the shape of my province, and even pigs and cows.

I decided to do a reverse cut out of a cow, meaning keeping the outer pieces, leaving a blank space in the shape of a cow.
I used some spruce and stained it and then cut the pieces in uneven lengths and glued the pieces together, edge to edge.
The cow shape was cut with my jigsaw. Once I had it cut out I thought it needed something else, the cow needed to be filled in. First I painted the cut edges of the cow with a cream colour and then painted a thin piece of plywood black and screwed it to the back of the piece. I added three coat hooks across the bottom.
Cow 
I superimposed Farmhouse and Welcome to give customers ideas of what I could paint on this piece. Someone may want their family name as well.
Cow 
Cow 
26″ x 13 1/2″
 
follow your heart woodworking  
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Another Whale

Hers’s another whale I made, it is the same shape as the whale I shared the other day HERE . This time I used a very old piece of wood 36″ long by a full 11 1/2″ wide. I call this a reverse cut out since I use the outside or background of the shape. I don’t know if that is the technical term for it, maybe I just made that up?

On the back are separate strips of thin plywood painted in different beachy colours.
 
It is made in the same style as my mermaid 

HERE

 
The mermaid is SOLD but the whale is in my shop along with other designs.
 
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