Wedding Card Crate - Vintage Cherry

I ended up making another wedding card crate for a customer on Etsy. This one is pine stained in Vintage Cherry. They are available for sale here.

Details and more pics after the jump.

Elongated Octagonal Dice Tray - Rosewood Stain and Black Felt

Another elongated dice tray out the door. This one got a healthy dose of General Finishes Rosewood Gel Stain and black felt. The finish is Formby's Tung Oil.

For size reference, the long axis is 9 1/4 inches, the short axis is 6 1/4 inches. The gold dice are 12 mm and the blue dice are 19 mm.

Other color combinations are visible on the gallery post. And, of course, they are available for purchase on Etsy.

More pics after the jump:

Black Stain Elongated Tray with Purple Felt

Another elongated dice tray out the door. This one got a healthy dose of General Finishes Black Gel Stain and purple felt. The finish is Formby's Tung Oil. I, humbly, think it turned out great. The customer had a great eye for combining the dark colors of black and purple.

For size reference, the long axis is 9 1/4 inches, the short axis is 6 1/4 inches. The gold dice are 12 mm and the blue dice are 19 mm.

Other color combinations are visible on the gallery post. And, of course, they are available for purchase on Etsy.

Rustic Wedding Card Crate

My lovely spouse had the idea of having people drop cards off at our wedding into a box that looked sort of like an old-timey beer shipping crate. She found an example on etsy, and I gave it a shot.

General Finishes - Spiced Walnut

I made a rustic crate. It's basically just a box. But, we wanted it stained darker rather than the bright yellowish color of pine. So, off to General Finishes we go and to their swatches. We opted for an oil-based liquid stain, specifically Spiced Walnut Oil Stain. After the jump are some pictures of how it turns out on pine.

Square Dice Tray - Black

Those dice have so much space!

I received another custom order for a dice tray. For this one, the request was 9" x 9" square, wood stained black. The quadrilateral design is closer to the small rectangular tray, but larger, than it is to the octagonal designs. Staining it black, however, was a new wrinkle. Pictures and discussion after the jump.

General Finishes - Black

Three Coats of Stain on Red Oak, Six Coats of Varnish

I received a commission for a square dice tray, with the request: "can you stain it black or ebony?" Well, yes indeed sir; I can.

General Finishes makes a family of stains, gel stains, that are thick and seemed to me to be ideal for the task of "turn this non-black wood into black wood." I used General Finishes Black Gel Stain. A quick overview of it is after the jump.

General Finishes - Weathered Gray

I made a handful of frames from some wood from my great-grandparents' barn in Oklahoma. Barn wood is unique looking. Over the many years it sits in the beating sun, exposed to windswept dust, and rain. Exposed to the elements like this, the bright tan color of wood weathers to a gray. Different parts of the wood fibers wear away, winter and summer growth rings have different density so they wear unevenly. This combines to create the unique appearance of barn wood.

Tiny problem though: when you cut barn wood to the size of whatever you're using it for, you're stripping away those years of weathering and exposing fresh wood to the surface. After the jump is info about how I tried to counteract this problem.

Elongated Octagonal Dice Tray Gallery

Walnut with cocoa brown felt lining

I've created this post simply to have a consolidated gallery of all of the octagonal dice trays that I've made. After the jump are all of the pictures.

My elongated dice trays are available for sale on Etsy.

Elongated Octagonal Dice Tray - v. 1.0

I toyed with calling this an "irregular" octagon. Okay, because I have a lot of respect for my readers, I will concede: Technically this is a "regular" octagon because all of the interior angles are 135 degrees. However, colloquially, it appears "irregular" insofar as it is a polygon that does not approximate a circle, but rather approximates an oval or ellipse. I settled on "elongated" as it adequately describes it. Everyone on board with my pedantry?

(Source)

General Finishes: Rosewood Stain

So, I generally have been on record as being not exactly pro-stain; however, I have used it in the past with postiive results. Also, I got a custom order recently that requested this stain be used, so I figured it was a good excuse to snap a few pictures to demonstrate what exactly this kind of stain does.

Mission Style Wine Rack

I was commissioned to build a wine rack in a different style than the ones I've made in the past. The woodwork in this house fits into the "Mission" style, and thus the design matched the period, style, and materials of Mission furniture. Details and pictures after the jump.

Java Gel Stain

It's a can of stain!

General Finishes Java Gel Stain has gotten a pretty hard push on social media lately (Seriously). I was making a frame for someone's college diploma recently, and she wanted dark wood but did not seem too thrilled with walnut. To achieve the desired aesthetic I could have held true to my tendency not to use stain and built the frame out of something like ebony, but that would have been ridiculously expensive (and really, kind of wasteful; that's not what ebony should be used for). This scenario is ideal for using a stain to darken a cheaper, lighter-colored, wood.

Stain Match 1.0

Okay. This is going to be tough. It's also a post that is going up mid-construction. Here's the deal: A commission requires me to make new furniture match this color...

Here's the problem. I don't have either any more of that stain or any ability to add 25ish years of UV exposure and general aging that I can just whip up. That means we've gotta just, ya know, wing it.

Stain vs. No Stain

I don't like stain. I don't hate it. Things that have been stained can look quite striking. However, I think that nature gifted us with a broad spectrum of natural wood colors to choose from, and those species' natural colors contribute greatly to the beauty of a piece.

I'm putting this post together to try to give you a window into my design preference. Other people's tastes may differ, which is certainly okay. I'm going to post a few pictures of stained and unstained woods. Hopefully it gives you a sense for some of the things that are out there, though I'm not really going to do the subject justice because there are literally woods of any color of the rainbow (orange, red, purple, white, and black among hundreds, if not thousands, more).

Lot's of pictures after the jump, some of which are kind of big. I'm not sure whether when google makes thumbnails of the pictures for in-text-viewing if it downloads the whole image (I'm inclined to think no), but if it does, then that would eat up 25ish MB-sized chunk of your mobile data. If you open the images separately  however, I'm sure it would load a large image. So proceed informed.

Nostalgia Table

Back when I was a wee (as wee as any 15 year old scrawny little fella can be) little freshman in high school, I ended up enrolled in the equivalent of Woodworking 2. Did I skip Woodworking 1 due to my talent? Test out of it? Nope... It was pretty much just the ineptitude of the guidance counselors, but hey, any port in a storm right? Woodworking 1 was for chuds.

Anyway, in this class we built this end table cabinet thing. More or less, it was my first real woodworking project. (I built a Nativity Scene when I was in middle school, but it's not the right season, so I'm just not going to count it).

Why am I posting about this? Mainly to show where I started, and to give you a sense of how far I've come.