Week Five, Still Alive

Have you noticed how this blog is entirely about my furniture making course? Currently, I'm doing pretty much nothing else remotely crafty: all my creative energy (and most of any other sort of energy I have) is being poured into it. I haven't picked up a pair of knitting needles in weeks.

Week five involved a lot of planing, trying and trying and trying to get the pieces of softwood into shape for my trestle. A laborious and somewhat frustrating process. This is a picture of the trestle-top (from last week), once I'd finished making it true, and a piece of approximately its original dimensions...



One of these boards is not like the other. Thankfully, applying the same process to the leg components was much more straightforward: they were less warped overall, and with smaller surfaces. The next job was marking and cutting compound angles at the legs' ends: this is so that the legs of the trestle will be neatly splayed in two dimensions.

After my previous efforts with the saw, I was a little nervous, but with a bit of extra coaching I found the knack and was somewhat more reliable in cutting a straight line. Once cut, I finally had the opnportunity to use two other planes (the #4 and the block plane) to smooth down the ends. Aren't they beautiful?