Finishing.

 

Polish mops housed in a funky new home

This week (and next) is all about the polish. How to finish off your pieces of hand made furniture beautifully so that they are all shiny and bling. It sounds easy, but it isn't. Its also a lot harder work than one would expect. I started off the week feeling like a 5 year old in art class, playing around with water colours and different stains, all of which was much fun. Then we moved on to the sticky stuff, French polish, which gets everywhere no matter how hard you try. The process essentially involves slapping on several layers of the sticky stuff (using a home made polish mouse, Sir Mighty Mouse to you), sanding it down and repeating until you get a matt finish over the piece. All very counterintuitive, but it works (eventually, if your little arms don't fall off in the process).

Stacks of sycamore all planed and ready to go

A home for your bling

Work on my new dresser is progressing a pace (just a relatively slow one). After a couple of weeks of hard graft planing and cutting, I've finally got most of my pieces of wood cut-up, and it won't be long until the fun starts and I get to glue bits together! In the meantime, there's more sanding and cutting down to be done. To distract myself from the mundane, I decided to put together the jewellery tree that was meant to be the piece de resistance on my new dresser. This is probably the most fun thing I've made in my time here and am pretty chuffed with the end result. I might just make me up one to keep in my spare time!

One of the best thing about the course is how much we all seem to learn from the other students on the course. Because everyone is making a different project, we get to see all kinds of weird and wonderful pieces take shape and absorb the different ideas everyone seems to have to solve the problems they are encountering. Today's fun tip was from Colin, who has made a very simple and effective template/mould to house the router whilst he does the complicated cut-outs needed for his table legs, together with some clever ideas for clamping the piece in place whilst working on it. Neat.