Plant Stand

This is a piece I completed a while back before I acquired a digital camera so I don’t have any assembly pictures. The design is from Robert W. Lang’s “Shop Drawings for Craftsman Furniture”. He has three books that I know of, two on furniture building, and one which I don’t have which is more on Craftsman style built-ins and trim work. I highly recommend these books for anyone who is into this style. I can’t vouch for the dimensional accuracy to the originals, I sometimes question this as my finished pieces proportions don’t always quite look like pictures of the originals that sometimes show up on Ebay and the like, but I have yet to find any errors in the books dimensioned drawings that would produce annoying fit errors.

The tiles on the top of the plants stand I had hand made for this piece. I went to a tile store in Pasadena, Ca. that catered to high end custom home restoration hoping to find something off the shelf or even ordered out of catalog. Ordering out of a catalog at this place meant picking your basic design from walls of design books and then basically painting by numbers the colors you want in each field. Those four, and a spare, tiles ended up being something just under $100 a sq ft. People do their entire kitchen or bath in this manner. Some folks make just too much money. Anyway, I bit the bullet and order these tiles and had to wait 4 or 5 weeks while they were made and shipped to my shop. The ironic thing about the whole stand is when it’s working as a plant stand you can’t even see the darn tiles. Oh well, it was an interesting experience regardless.

The finish on this one was simply wipe on oil/stain. This piece was completed before I started exploring the dye/stain/varnish-Tung oil process. The wood is obviously QSWO.