Fairy Furniture Grand daughters leave grandpas with the privilege of doing cool stuff. Here is the furniture with which she can join Alice at afternoon tea in the backyard. Even though this is made from decking boards, a life outdoors will see the timber eventually split and fall apart. So, a decision has to be…
Clip Board The note pad that went into the Mothers’ Day baskets was a hit. It was both simple to make and functional.Wooden mechanisms are clumsy. At the proportions of a note pad it is difficult to include complexity. But, enlarged to A4 scale you can fit a nice wooden spring loaded clip at the…
Wooden hand plane aficionados (ambiguity intentional) make much of the fact that they can use words like “frog, cutting angle and throat” with confidence. That confidence is proof that they must be experts! If you add complexity to the activity then great reverence must be assumed. Much is made of achieving chisel cuts at particular…
Recycled Glass Table The major inspiration behind this table is ownership of a circle of glass that is too good to throw away. In the 1980’s it was part of a fashionable little iron framed thingy. A clever wood turner made three legs with large balls on top and slots cut to enable glass to…
Our shopping basket seemed to take foreverrrrrr to finish, but that was only because a few of my disabled friends renewed their love for sanding and painting. It was a good thing, for the results were so good we decided to give the baskets to our mothers for Mothers’ Day. But it wasn’t quite Mothers’…
Naughty Fun Making a rubber band gun is a bit of a dilemma. Is it an encouragement for naughty behaviour? Is it a precursor for violent solutions to problems? As a child, the rubber band guns I made were delicious! Mum didn’t like them; that made them more fun! I didn’t shoot dogs or people;…
A woodwork project with children led me to revisit Sam’s basket as an Easter project. Here it is with a bit of upholstery and a few eggs in side. Modifications Making this with dexterous children allowed a few modifications to the original method.The skewers that we laboriously drilled for and hammered in could be simple…
Weddings generate lots of emotional investment. Minute details become important. To make something for a wedding is to buy shares in loaded scrutiny. Here is my response to a request for a box to take cards at a wedding. The brief was relatively open; it sought a white container with a slot for posting cards in its…
Everything my friends make begins with best laid plans. But they do go astray! In this case there were aspects of the construction process that were so difficult that I needed to invent some extra help. Here is little bench clamp that holds up the basket end. At the beginning stage the unsupported end won’t…
Inspired by a Grand-daughter Rites of passage require Grandma and Grandpa to stay overnight and be responsible parents again. We were responsible for a wondrous darling born at just 25 weeks, but now 20 months old, crawling with a formula 1 ego and on the brink of walking. Revisiting parenthood for 24 hours was a…