Getting it Down on Paper.

At the close of the last post, I'd made some choices in figure placement that greatly lessened the amount of Birch I had left for the Gretchin's Cradle. Luckily, one of the few things I like to shop for is wood. I can spend hours milling through the selections at Jensen's Hardwoods. Like I mentioned before, it's the happiest place on the earth..for me. Several months before I had gone up with several hundred dollars burning a hole in my pocket and picked up some what I can only describe as leopard spotted Claro Walnut,

a book-matched set of crotch figured Elm,

a beautiful piece of Cherry

 and some nice straight grain Black Walnut. Like many of my shopping adventures, I shopped until I ran out of cash in pocket. None of these boards was purchased with any particular use in mind. They're just nice boards.

When thinking about how to move forward on Gretchin's Cradle, I thought that if I'm going to get into a different wood anyway, I'm going to go for contrast. One option would've been the Cherry, as it darkens with exposure to the sun, but not quite the contrast I was looking for and I'd already claimed that for one of my "ongoing" projects, the Guild Shaker Table Build (more on that at a later date). The prominent figure in the crotch and flame Birch would clash against leopard Claro. Even though my wife has to pick out my clothes, I DO know stripes don't go with spots. At least I don't think they do. Garanimals anyone? I have a "grown up" version. So, the straight grained Black Walnut had to step up. Since it was straight grained, I thought I would try my hand at bent wood lamination. It's a technique I had seen many time and figured, what the heck, it can't be too hard.

The first thing was to come up with a design. After a whole lot of sketching, I had this on paper.

As I have yet to learn SketchUp, I'm still doing thing the "old school" way. The good thing is I actually love to sketch. This sketch shows that you don't have to be an artist to sketch designs. This part of the process probably took me the majority of my evenings for a week and by the following weekend, I was ready to start figuring out how to do my first bentwood lamination. I'll cover that in the next installment as well as how I have my band saw set up for resawing. Enjoy the week!! I hope you get lots of shop time!