In and out of the studio..

This past week has been a busy one for me, dividing my time between the studio and our outside property. We leave a considerable amount of outside work to early fall when the days are cooler and it is a little more bearable to work outside. These past few days has been tree maintenance, removing any shoots and dead limbs. Later this fall comes the pruning, it is best to wait until the trees have shed their leaves to do this and to prevent any damage to the trees.

In the studio, progress on the jewelry armoire is advancing with some final wood preparation. This involves thicknessing and dimensioning the individual components to the correct size as per the drawings. The door frame components need to have an extra length included to allow for the tenons. The tenons of the rails fit into the mortises of the stiles. Rails run horizontally, whereas stiles run vertically. Once the components of the jewelry armoire door frames have been dimensioned correctly, I place them together to make certain I have not made an error in my calculations. this is a form of sanity check. The door frame members typically define the width of the cabinet or armoire in my case, but this is wholly dependant on the hinging arrangement of the doors to the cabinet sides. If the doors overlap the sides completely, combined door widths define the cabinet width, if the doors are rabbeted into the cabinet (armoire) sides, there is a extra dimension on either side which is added to the door widths to determine cabinet width. These are all decisions made in the design process, however, they do need to be taken into consideration. I have also been preparing a couple of smaller pieces for an upcoming exhibition at a gallery.

In the next few days I begin the next phase of the project. This involves gluing up the individual components of the cabinet sides, top and bottom. Hopefully I won't run into any snags. After this is complete I begin to create the tiger maple panels for the doors. My aim is to have the doors assembled and glued before assembling the cabinet as a unit.