Jewelry “Tree"

This was a Christmas gift for my Wife that I completed on Christmas Eve. She asked for a Jewelry “Tree” as a gift, and I looked in the Mall for something suitable but couldn’t find anything. This sparked a new idea, one I had been needing an excuse for. The only part of this project that cost any money were the 2 stainless steel #8 1-1/4” screws to hold the “tree” to the base and an $8 pint of satin poly for the finish. I work in the landscape industry and my company does very high-end landscape installations at very exclusive estates in South Florida. This means a lot of dumpster diving when the cabinet and wood flooring guys are doing their work to finish a mansion. In this case, I had some beautiful quarter-sawn white oak from a “dive” I completed decades ago. I scavenged a 6’ length of 1” x 1” Walnut from a friend in the cabinet business, and the “tree” was an old piece of Sand Pine I found while mountain biking in a local State Park several years ago. Thank God I’m a packrat!

The “tree” piece was stable and did not show any signs of active rot, so I simply finished it with three coats of satin polyurethane ( I actually dunked it into the can of finish to have it soak into the cracks and voids as best it could). The base was generally straightforward, with the exception of cutting the walnut edging stock too short as you can see from the third photo. I contemplated taking the easy route and fudging it, but I’m glad I chose to cut another piece and do it right. I used a neat wedge clamping system my friend showed me for pulling the miters together tightly. The most frightening part of the project was locating the screw holes ( picture 5) to pull the tree down to the base, all the time being conscious of the natural state of this wood and all the voids and cracks it contained. Needless to say, that was one of the slowest times known to man for two screws to fasten one piece of wood to another. It’s a very solid piece of woodwork / art and I enjoyed making it. My wife cried when she opened the box, so I guess that’s a success! Thanks for viewing; this is my first LJ project, and I look forward to posting more soon.