{"id":289,"date":"2009-09-07T20:33:48","date_gmt":"2009-09-08T01:33:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenonandspline.com\/?p=289"},"modified":"2009-09-07T20:48:10","modified_gmt":"2009-09-08T01:48:10","slug":"growth-rings-serving-tray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenonandspline.com\/blog\/archives\/289","title":{"rendered":"“Growth Rings” Serving Tray"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a very busy summer<\/a> and I opted to spend most of my free time with my family rather than in the shop. Other than a couple cutting boards (after seeing all the cool ones posted at lumberjocks.com in the past few months I just had<\/em> to try a few myself!), I really haven’t spent any significant time in the shop.<\/p>\n

However, while shopping for a gift for my wife on the occasion of our 6th wedding anniversary, I learned that the traditional gift was candy<\/em> or iron <\/em>and the modern alternate was wood<\/em>. In keeping with this theme, many of the online vendors were selling wooden boxes containing chocolates. This seemed like a great gift idea, but, being a woodworker, clearly I couldn’t buy<\/em> her a wooden box. However, since I didn’t have time to build a nice<\/em> box and don’t have any real experience with them anyway, I looked for another idea.<\/p>\n

For the past 5 anniversaries I’ve made it a sort of tradition to get up early and, now that we have children, taking the kids out with me to pick up cinnamon rolls for breakfast. This year, I decided, I would make<\/em> her breakfast instead and serve it to her, with chocolate-dipped strawberries<\/em>, on a handmade wooden serving tray.<\/p>\n

And this is the result.<\/em><\/p>\n

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This project was unique in that it’s the first project I designed entirely in my head and during the actual construction process. Typically I design my pieces in detail in SketchUp before even selecting the lumber. I must admit it was kinda fun building this way \u2014 designing on-the-fly<\/em> so to speak \u2014 though I’m not sure I’ll make this the new norm.<\/p>\n

The bulk of the body of the tray is cherry, the handles are walnut. The horizontal strips (the growth rings<\/em>) are curly maple and purpleheart. The purpleheart, incidentally, was from a board my wife gave me for our fifth anniversary. Each strip represents a different milestone — the day we met, our wedding day, birth of a child and anniversaries. I labeled them with dates on the back and signed the piece with a personal message for my lovely wife.<\/p>\n

The biggest challenge in this piece was scooping out the “dish” of the tray. I built the tray in a single day — it was the only time I could spend in the shop without letting on what I was up to. Therefore I had to hurriedly cobble together a quick-y template and jig to position and guide the router. The template slipped a bit on the front edge and the bottom was uneven in spots, requiring a good deal of sanding to make it acceptable. There are still a number of visible imperfections in the piece which, in this case I think give it character. It really does look handmade. <\/em>In any event, I didn’t have much choice but to accept it as the best I could do within available time. It was a real hit with my wife and will certainly be difficult to top next year!<\/p>\n

(PS – In case you’re curious, for her part my wife gave me a waffle iron <\/em>(I love cooking from-scratch pancake breakfast with the kids on weekends and my son would eat waffles for all three meals if we allowed him) and made a generous <\/em>contribution to my tool fund \u2014 I’m presently more than 1\/2 way to a Festool Domino. Woo-hoo!)<\/em><\/p>\n

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