sutton046

The big jarrah cabinet I am making has been progressing slowly. Embarrassingly slowly. Interestingly, I have had an unprecedented number of group activities this year: across the Festivals, workshops, and school programs that I do. It's taken me be surprise, really, though it is what I have always intended, to transition from custom furniture to more group activities and teaching. My customers awaiting their beautiful jarrah cabinet have been incredibly patient. For that I am extremely grateful - but ultimately it will have been worth the wait. No question. I am pleased to say a big step forward has taken place. The other day a friend came over to help me with the big glue-up of the top section. Phil's assistance was most appreciated, as it was a big job I couldn't do on my own. There was a huge amount of preparation before this event, with all the panels and fixed shelves having to be prepared and glued up, accurately cut to size, and every joint cut and test fitted, bef...

Today I was involved in a fun Earthcarers activity at the Karrinyup Community Centre. All around the idea of making Christmas presents, there were a range of workshops to chose from, with people making soap, dukkah, dream catchers,  tea-light holders, and more. I was running the workshop on recycling pallets and wooden crates. It was a hoot. With ute and trailer loaded up with pallets and crate material, I arrived on site. My demo piece : A "folded pallet" garden seat. The seat pictured above was a demo that I had made a couple of days beforehand, just to help convey some the wonderful potential of pallets for making stuff. This pallet was from the Czech republic. A folded pallet, as I call the method, required one pallet and just  couple of other pieces of timber pulled from another pallet. Making a pair of Stilts. Wheel chocks from a pallet which once shipped a ride-on mower. What better use for them? Those wheel chocks nailed to the sticks just screamed of stilts. They jus...

The big jarrah cabinet I am making will bear a number of features borrowed from a couple of antiques which share the same room the finished cabinet will reside in. It's a nice way of making the 3 pieces of furniture sit together nicely. One of these features will be the front edge profile of the top section, the verticals and the shelves. I am seeking to create a close match to the tall antique sideboard in the room. The profile is like a pair of parallel lines, almost like a pair of reeds along each edge of the face.  The edge profile on the tall antique sideboard. This is what I aim to match.   Creating an edge profile like this would have been traditionally done with either a specially shaped plane iron, in a wooden moulding plane - or it would have been done with a Scratch Stock. These are sometimes also referred to as Beading Tools. Scratch Stocks are essentially just shaped scrapers, set in a wooden holder which determines the dimensions of the profile an...

The big recycled jarrah  cabinet continues to take shape. The top sections of the cabinet will primarily be used for the housing and displaying of ceramic art pieces. The bottom sections of the cabinet will house some serious HIFI and media gear, plus as many LPs, CDs & amps; DVDs and as muchother technology as we can creatively fit within the space available. I am currently working on the lower section of the cabinet. The longer section is quite deep, and the return is very shallow in depth. In this shallow section, behind the pair of doors, will be two storage bins for good old-fashioned vinyls - LP Records. In an effort to maximise the space available, I have been making another pair of bins to hold as many audio CDs as possible. The space left over will be divided into small shelves to hold more CDs. The bins will be hinged to fold outward in order to access their contents, and these bins will be held together by dovetail joints, with Half-blind Dovetail...