Making A Shaker Style Desk for my Writer Friend

         Last summer, my friend Andres had asked me to build him a new writing desk. He is a true devotee to the craft, writing for over an hour each weekday on a failing IKEA desk, and thus was in sore need of some new furniture.    

        I chose to design the desk in the style of Shaker furniture since it's not an overly complicated style, but still looks quite neat. Historically, most of these kind of desks were made of local species such as Pine, Maple, or Cherry (as is this desk), and were often lightly painted or stained in red, yellow, or orange hues.

Building the Rocker in Solid Wood at Last

        After testing out the full-scale prototype and making some slight adjustments to the proportions, it was finally time to build the real thing. While historically, these chairs were typically made of Teak or Rosewood (due to their abundance and low costs between the 1950s and 70s), today those wood species are rather expensive, so I decided to opt for Cherry instead. 

        My girlfriend Sarah very generously offered to sew some cushion covers to go along with upholstery foam I ordered. She found a vintage French fabric that I thought fit quite well with the time-period these chairs were originally made in.

Revisiting Danish Modernism: Prototyping a Classic Rocker

Completed Prototype

        A little while ago I came across a photograph of a Scandinavian rocking chair that I very much took an interest in. I decided to have a go at reproducing the chair, first as a plywood prototype, and then, made from solid wood, which would end up being used for a final school project in my cabinetmaking program. 

        I've been wanting to post more about furniture history since that's an area I'm very interested in. This article really dives into that aspect, before I post about how I made the final product.

Taking Holy Orders: Making a Church Reception Desk

           After a local church in LaSalle had reached out to my school with an idea for a standing reception desk, myself and 3 other students were put to the task of bringing this design to life. 

Making Curved Furniture: Demilune Table

        After studying curved furniture for a few weeks, I decided to take on an American classic: the Demilune table. It took me about 2 weeks of shop time to complete the build, not including around 2-3 days of research, making a drawing package, and a procedure to work from.

        Making this for first time, I was mostly focused on wrapping my head around the complex joinery between the curved and straight components, as well as really perfecting the process of bending wood for this build.

Steam-Bending Shaker Oval Boxes

        Oval boxes were some of the best known items produced by the Shaker community from the late 1700s - mid 20th century. They were used to hold everything from flour in the food pantry to nails in the workroom, were as small as 2" in length to as large as over a foot, and were used throughout the Shaker communities as well as sold to the general public.

        To make the iconic oval shape of the box, I experimented with the technique of steam bending solid wood. 

Shop-Made Inlay Banding

        For a recent box I made, I decided to add some custom inlay banding for ornament around the sides. Inlay, like marquetry, is a decorative veneering technique where a thin pattern is set into a recess in solid wood. To create this banding, I repeatedly glued and cut veneer strips with solid wood to achieve a 'chevron' pattern, somewhat like 2 dimensional origami, but with wood.

        Today, inlay banding can be purchased in most woodworking stores, but is ridiculously expensive due to the exotic materials it uses and the lengthy time it takes to produce. Here is how I made my own banding at my school's shop:
        

Exploring Traditional Marquetry Techniques

        One of the classic ways to elevate the intricacy and intrigue of a woodworking project is to incorporate marquetry. Marquetry is a decorative technique involving the cutting and re-assembling of thin pieces of wood to form various designs. My class spent around 1 month learning this and other traditional techniques, culminating in a personal project that applied what we learned.

Making & Installing Kitchen Cabinets

        As part of a kitchen cabinetmaking module, my class collaborated to build and install this kitchen for one our school's caretakers, Frank. 

        Prior to this project, we had made a lot of free-standing furniture, so being able to install in an existing space made this a very interesting project. Notably, having to account for uneven floors and irregular walls during the installation required us to build in ways that left tolerances for various imperfections in the space.

Making a Chessboard Using Torrefied Wood

         At the end of last year, I made this chessboard as a Christmas gift for my girlfriend Sarah's parents and am very pleased with how it turned out. It was a great way to work with some new materials as well as to practice very precise laminations. For the individual pieces, I milled various basswood blanks, which Sarah then used to cut various profiles, followed by staining half to create a light and dark set.

Using the CNC to Make a Simple but Useful Jig

        As part of a unit in school learning to make  commercial / institutional furniture, I made this jig to help with making a leg assembly for a bench. You can see the completed project's plans here, and the photos here.

        The jig is rather simple. There's an MDF panel slightly larger than the perimeter dimensions of the leg assembly, with a curve at the top that will be the reference face for the bearing on the Shaper (to create the top profile on the legs). To keep the assembly in place, the jig has a pocket half the depth of the panel that a raised insert fits into. The middle of the leg assembly then fits around the insert.

Two Kinds of Edge Banding for Panel Furniture

        Since beginning to work with composite wood such as plywood and particleboard, learning and practicing different kinds edge banding has been a key skill to conceal unsightly edges. Solid wood vs iron-on edge banding are two such applications that I detail below in how I have used them to make  furniture, as well how they compare to one another.

Veneer Parquetry Design for Panel Furniture

           Having been tasked with creating a parquetry veneer pattern for a door and drawer face of a Credenza school project, I decided to explore different radial burst designs to create a similar yet slightly contrasting look. I have always found radial burst patterns to be quite stunning on furniture. They draw the eye along their lines, create a unique pattern of symmetry, and can be made in countless of different ways.

Making a Hexagonal Box

        As a way to practice miter joints and solid wood edge banding, I made this small hexagonal box from some Yellow Poplar and Cherry off-cuts I found around my school's shop. The inspiration and much of the guidance for this box came from Clark Kellogg's article in Fine Woodworking #285, 'Hexagonal Boxes Are Little Gems.' In the end, it was a great exercise in precision woodworking using both hand and power tools alike.

Making the Outer Box - Mitered Sides and Rebates

        After milling the poplar to ⅜" thickness and ripping to 2 ⅝" width for the box height, I set up the table saw to cut the sides.

Making a Shaker Nightstand

        I made this Shaker style Nightstand as an early assignment for school. For complete plans, be sure to refer to the the Technical Drawings pages of my blog. The Shaker Style is great for beginner cabinetmakers, such as myself, as it emphasizes simplicity and functionality over ornate details. This allows us to learn and practice techniques that are not overly complex but still very common in furniture-making, such as leg-tapers, mortise and tenon joinery, and more.

        The full drawing package I made for this project is available here.

        The Shakers based much of their design principles off of their religious views. In their eyes, furniture's beauty was found in the balance and harmony of a work's shapes and proportions, its functionality, and simplicity, over all.