Table. Slowly but surely...

I have not made any progress on my table lately.

I need to buy more Ash so that I can make the width closer to 30 inches.

Right now it's something around 25 inches, which makes it rather cramped for two people to sit across from each other. Therefore, I need to but another five inch piece of Ash and take it right to the end of my bread-board end. I also think I hastily cut my ends so that they are something like 27 inches. Oh well.

I have been working on my stool, which is my actual project. It's coming along nicely.

I oiled the base on Saturday, and even though it looks very "low volume"

, as my professor, Leah Woods, described it, the upholstered seat really pops now with the oiled Spanish Cedar.

Here are some pictures of the progression of my stool:

She's a whole lotta Rosie before I started cutting.

Above: I really wanted to stop with the leg shape I had here, but had to press on.

Below: She's starting to shape up.

So here we are. Don't think that I am slackin' on my other table. I need to do my graded work first.

There are some cool features on this stool though. I wanted to leave the legs uncut, without all taper cuts that you see in the last photo. When I looked at it, it told me that it was finished. So, to be sure, I made a test leg out of Poplar and cut it to the shape of the final leg. When I put it all together, it looked good. And I decide to make all the tapers on all the legs.

It's kind of sad that I have to put a seat into it, because when you look at the legs down through the open frame ( where the seat/fabric goes ) you get a really interesting view of the insides of all the legs.

But, as I said earlier, the upholstery looks pretty good -- quality-wise, not bad for my first outing, not too much pucker of the fabric -- and its functions is quite good -- good feel when you set your tushy down, the seat frame doesn't bite into your leg.

I was going to do some dark wood accents but decided against it for a number of reasons; dark wood feet and splines in the seat frame, both in Black Walnut. But I didn't want any end grain to show in the feet so I would have had to make some funky glue up pieces and screw them on; plus it would have raised my seat height, which I did not want to do.

And the spline are Spanish Cedar also, but since they are from a different board, they will have a different tone, which will be an accent of the monochromatic kind.

So there you go -- a crash course in my design decisions.

I'll post some more and better quality pics when it's all done.