New Project: Dressing Stand

So, it has been a long time since I have updated.  the project that I have been working on is a dressing stand.  It is a small box with one drawer and a mirror on top.  The idea is that someone could put it on a chest of drawers or a desk and use it to do their make-up, brush their hair, etc.  It took lots of drafts to come to a final design.  I was designing according to the piece of wood and piece of veneer that I already had, which did not entirely go as plan, but the results have still been nice.

Front view.

Front view of the standard (the arm that holds the mirror.)  This is the part which took the longest to design.  I probably did at least 20 drafts to come to something with the right curves that would actually physically work.  It will be made from one solid piece, but be carved to look like one is in front and the other behind.

Side view.  You can see that the mirror tips back and the standards taper.  You can also see that the front bows out.

Plan view (view from above).  In this view you get the best look at the serpentine shape of the front.

Construction begins! And immediately is set back.  The case is mitered (jointed together at a 45 degree angle) so there is no visible joint on the outside.  Originally I was going to use hidden splines cut from the inside before the case is glued together.  Unfortunately, when I was cutting them the router bit slipped out and blew through the outside of the case. 

Instead of hidden miters, I glued the case together first, then cut through miters.  In this picture you can see the knot in the middle that I was designing around.  After designing the whole case around where that knot was, I milled the wood and the knot moved because it did not go straight through the piece of wood, so I had to make the whole case less wide. In the end, it didn't matter because once I decided to do through splines, I decided to veneer the entire outside of the case to hide the splines.

Here are all the splines in place.  They just need to be trimmed flush.  Part of the design was that the curve of the front matches the curve of the grain lines around the knot (which will now be hidden by veneer).

I didn't take pictures for a while because I got frustrated with some setbacks and was trying to get a lot done before Christmas.  Here I have the drawer constructed and I am veneering the front of it.  The 5/8 in thick drawer front was cut from 2 in thick stock to account for the serpentine shape.

This is what the veneer on the drawer front looks like (although the drawer is upside down in this picture.)  I learned a lot about veneering.  It is a time consuming process during which you need to be very careful to not crack the fragile veneers.  It is worth the work, though, for the beautiful results.

This is the mirror frame after I shaped it.  It is made from 6 trapezoidal pieces that are connected by the small white splines you can see in the picture. The shaping of this also uses a lot of wood for a thin result, but that is  what needs to be done to get curved shapes.  The splines provide a better glue surface making the joint much more durable. 

To apply the edge veneer I cut the pieces, glued them in place and then taped them down securely with a combination of masking and electrical tape.  This project uses a lot of tape to apply veneer.

This it the result of the edge veneer.

In the foreground I am flattening some pieces of veneer by applying a lot of pressure between two pieces of MDF with an excess of hand screws.  In the background I am applying the veneer to the side of the case with hand screws.

Once the sides and top of the case were veneered I was able to cut the shape of the front on the bandsaw to match the drawer front.  I did it in this order because once the drawer was veneered, I couldn't change its shape, but I could still shape the case to match it.

Here is a decent shot of the veneer on the top of the case.  It is the crotch of a walnut tree.  This is the area where a branch meets the trunk of a tree.  The growth rings in the trunk overlap with those in the branch, causing interesting grain patterns

Once the front was shaped it was time to apply veneer to the edge around the drawer.  More tape!  I used the piece I cut away when I veneered the drawer front, so there are continuous grain lines across the front of the whole piece.

This is the last bit of veneering. The mirror frame face was the most obnoxious part to veneer.  I had to cut small trapezoidal pieces and fit them together around the face so that all of the grain lines were pointing towards the middle.  The result was really nice though. 

While the veneer dried I began shaping the standards.  This tenon goes through to the bottom of the case where it will be held in place by a yolk.  This is not entirely necessary, but allows me to remove them once the project is done.  I chose to do this so that the mirror and standards can be removed for easy packing if it ever needs to be moved.  The tenon took a long time to cut because it is surrounded by angled shoulders on all sides.  It required a lot of set up on the table saw for a relatively small amount of cutting.

Veneering is done!  The stand is starting to come together.

Here I applied cherry stringing about the edges to protect the veneer, started to shape the standards and started to build the foot/ apron section.

Close up of the stringing and veneer.

The standards are fully cut out and ready to be carved.  The feet and apron are cut out and shaped.  The end is in sight, but there is still plenty to do.