A few small items for sale

Hello! I hope your week is going well.

I wanted to share a few small items I’ve recently finished making that are for sale. Moment of radical honesty: I didn’t get into woodworking to run a business, but I have to run a business to keep woodworking.

Where am I most comfortable? In the shop making furniture or learning skills or in the house trying out a new recipe.

Where am I least comfortable? Navigating the online world of content and marketing and imagery all designed to make what took hours of effort look tidy and beautiful.

Someone recently told me that growth and comfort rarely go hand in hand.

I find a lot of truth in that. This doesn’t mean I’m going to dive into the field of content creation with abandon, but I am going to dip my toe into online commerce as it fits my woodworking schedule.

Starting with these four items—there were five, but I’ve already sold one of my charcuterie boards, so now all I have at the moment are these four pieces. All of the links below take you to my website.

Thank you for supporting my woodworking adventures!

Black Walnut Charcuterie Board with Handles

All of my material comes from my dad’s sawmill; most of the wood is from the forest around his farm, though some also comes from friends’ land in the surrounding rural area in which we live.

This charcuterie board started out as a scrap leaning against the sawmill wall. The ripples of grain around the open knot remind me of an elephant’s trunk, wise with wrinkles indicating a long life of experiences.

I’ve been learning how to scoop out material from the center of boards, which makes for a better tray when carrying food that might potentially roll off. On this one, I put a couple of handles for easier carrying and I turned a small bowl (which is maybe better described as a round tray, as the inner bottom is quite flat—I’ve still got lots to learn on the lathe) out of Soft Maple. It sits lightly in the knot.

Natural Edge Cherry Coat Rack

I love Cherry and I loved the weird knot on the upper side of this board. It sat in my shop for quite awhile as I tried to figure out what to make with it. Clearly it wouldn’t work well in furniture. But I didn’t want to chop it up or take too much material off the bottom.

And then I thought about how nice it would look on a wall and was reminded of a stick turned into jewelry rack we used to own. This was too big for jewelry, but not for coats or scarves, so I found hooks and put them on.

I put two countersunk holes 16” apart on it (and will include two black construction screws with it) so that this can be easily mounted on a wall.

Cat Cutting Board

After a big project, a woodworker often has a lot of scraps left over. Some become firewood. But some are cleaned up and put to new purpose.

Late last fall, I finished making a dining table out of Soft Maple, and had some scraps piled under my workbench. I wanted to combine them with Black Walnut for the color contrast and I wanted to practice gluing up material—a basic skill, but sometimes practicing the foundational skills is a nice reprieve from the steep learning curve of more advanced techniques.

So this past month I was gluing up material like crazy. This small cutting board is one result.

And the cat? I wish I could take credit, but the drawing is by local artist Marianne Zerbe. I took the image and burned it onto the wood.

Black Walnut & Birch Cheese Board

As part of my gluing spree, I also glued strips of Black Walnut with wider Birch boards. I’ve not made anything out of Birch before, so I was curious to use it. Actually, I was curious to put finish on it and see how it looked. I love the color variations in it from pale to light, rich brown.

Josiah thinks this board looks like a wine bottle. The size was determined by the material—this was actually a scrap of a scrap, being a section cut off from a larger blank (that will be turned into something else).

Shaping the handle gave me a chance to practice making simple curves, which I’m trying to do in more of my work.

Know someone who might be interested in any of these? Please share this email with them. Thank you!