Trying to anyway.

The headboard of a bed is a big blank canvas.  No rules.  No constraints.  No functional requirements.  Just make something that looks cool in this big rectangle.

Which is liberating.  And scary.  What on earth will I do with all that space?

I get an idea.  I’ll fill it with a semi-random arrangement of something that looks like tiles or stone work but which is made of wood.  I pursue the idea on paper for days.  Days.  Different versions of it.  Different woods, different arrangements, different structures.  Nothing.  No goosebumps at all.

I hate letting go of the idea, because it’s an idea, and I have no other ideas.  But it’s not working.  Let it go.  Let it go.  Let.  It.  Go.

I let it go.  I take a walk.  I take a nap.  I eat a sandwich.  I talk on the phone.  I check Facebook.  I clean the kitchen.  Another walk.  Another nap.  No new ideas.  Nothing.

I start to feel incompetent.  I don’t know how to do this.  I start to whine to my friends.  Whining’s not enough, I need to whinge.  But that’s strictly an English thing.  Luckily I have a friend there.

I put out a desperate call for mojo on my Facebook status (see it here).  I get some ideas back from my friends.  Some are good, some are funny, some are ridiculous.

One is pivotal.  Jan’s.  ”I say look for forms in nature, God is a pretty good designer. ”

It’s not that I’ve never looked for natural inspiration.  It’s just that I hadn’t considered it for THIS project.  Why?  Who knows.

So, another walk.  Looking all around for…what?  My neighbor has a tree that’s perfectly symmetrical, and right now bare of any leaves.

I’m struck by the way a tree starts out at the bottom as a single trunk, then as it rises it divides into two or three large branches, and then they divide, and so on, until at the very top there are only thousands of little twigs.  I immediately remember that the room this bed will go in has windows that do something similar.  The lower sashes are a single pane, the uppers are six small panes:

So I come back home and draw this:

Goosebumps.

p.s. Another friend sent me this link.  Definitely relevant and very cool.  Watch the one called ‘Binary Trees.’

Every time I make a piece of furniture I end up with lots of scrap wood.  I cut furniture parts out of bigger pieces of wood (of course) and end up ‘wasting’ about 40% of every board.  Which sucks, because these woods are so beautiful.

So every Christmas I find something to do with the scraps.  This year, cutting boards.  Gifts for my friends and family.  I took all the scraps, milled them to different widths, and played around with patterns and random arrangements.

The woods I used this year were (from lightest to darkest), maple, curly maple, cherry, mahogany, bubinga, and wenge.  So that’s the woods my besties will be chopping their veggies on for the next many years.

I finished it with something called ‘Butcher Block Conditioner’ which you can find at Home Depot.  It’s basically mineral oil and beeswax.  Non toxic, soaks in and protects the wood from water.

Happy  Holidays!

QUICK AND EASY PICNIC TABLE RECIPE

Serves 8

Preparation Time: 2 hours*

Ingredients:

• Six (6) cedar boards, 2″ x 6″ x 10′.
• Four (4) cedar boards, 2″ x 4″ x 10′
• A sudden urge to finally build that picnic table you’ve been putting off for ten years
• A pretty place to put a new picnic table
• Lots of screws and a couple of lag bolts
• A shop with tools, like saws and drills and stuff.  If unavailable, substitute a friend’s shop.  Call me.
• An amazing Texas Fall day that makes you want to eat all the rest of your meals outside with all your friends for the rest of your life
• A new pot of coffee
• Two hours*

• First, get a wild hair to build a picnic table and ignore all the voices in your head that are scolding you to spend your time on something more important.  Now go to Home Depot and pick your cedar boards, making sure they are straight and relatively free of cracks.  Overlook the fact that each cedar board is about $12 whereas the same size boards in pine are only $4.  Cedar’s nicer.  Rationalize.  You’ve done it before, you can do it again.
• Bring the boards home in your minivan, all the time smelling the cedar and feeling a vague and illogical sense of nostalgia.  Pine for a log cabin or a campfire or something corny like that.
• Unload the boards into your shop.  Take a nap.  You’ve worked so hard already.
• Wake up, consider a tweet that you’re about to build a picnic table, then decide against it because, What if you screw it up and now everyone’s expecting pictures of a nice picnic table?  Get some coffee and stick your finger in the peanut butter jar but do it so it doesn’t look like someone stuck their finger in the peanut butter jar. Lick your finger clean.  Take a sip of coffee.  Now you’re ready to build.
• The 6″ boards will make the top.  Plane them smooth in your planer.  The 4″ boards will make the legs and understructure.  Measure and cut them at angles and stuff like that, then drill holes or whatever in them and like bolt them together and stuff.
• Now check your email and sip some coffee.  Spin through your iPod looking for just the right music to fit this mood.  Give up and just put it on NPR or Howard Stern.
• Now attach the top boards to the X shaped thingies with some screws.  Think about a joke involving the word ‘screw’ and realize how juvenile that is, and quickly turn your thoughts to serious things and world problems so you feel like an adult again.  NPR will help with this.
• Now your table is done.  See if it wobbles.  It does.  Decide that it’s OK for it to wobble because it’s just a picnic table, and if certain people won’t act stupid around it it’ll be just fine.  Consider painting or staining it or something, then decide that that’s too much work, and so rationalize that cedar needs to breath and develop a natural ‘patina’ in order to reach its full potential.
• Drag it to your deck, put something magazine-y on top and take a picture of it.  Wonder why you don’t do this sort of thing more often.  Wonder if any of your friends want one, and if you’d enjoy helping them build their own.  Wonder how much more peanut butter is left in that jar.

* This assumes that you have years of experience making furniture.  If you don’t it might take you a little longer.  Call me.  I can probably help.

Today I finished this king bed.  It’s made of cherry wood and and a wood some people call tiger maple, or curly maple, or fiddleback maple.  I call it amazing.

The best moments in woodworking are the very beginning of a project and the very end.  Like a pilot, I live for the takeoffs and the landings.

In the beginning my heart races as I pull wood from the rack and try to imagine which part I will make out of which piece.  I get positively chirpy as my mind reaches wide to wrap around the days and weeks ahead of me, all the fun I’m about to have.

And at the end, like earlier today, there is always a moment when I push the last drawer into place, or lock the last bedrail in, or wipe the table top off with a rag, and I suddenly realize that there is no more work to be done on this piece.  I take a deep breath and let it out slowly.  I set the piece in the middle of the shop facing my workbench.  I turn away from it and walk over to the bench, hoist myself up to sit, turn back to the piece, open my eyes, and take it in.  Sometimes I’ll sit there for half an hour, most of that time saying only three words to myself: I made that.