Sewing desk

My daughter Sarai wanted a sewing desk for her birthday last year,(Feb.) but since my shop isn't heated she had to wait a while till it warmed up like July ? No that's when I really finally got serious about it.
  We took some measurements and came up with a plan. So I knew somewhat what I wanted it to look like and some of the details I wanted. I wanted to use mortise and tenon joints and some tapered legs. I built a tapering jig for the legs so I could cut them on my tablesaw and used m & t joints to join the legs and rails that would support the left side of the desk and built a separate case on the right to house the drawers I built using half blind dovetails .
  The thing is I've studied woodworking and joinery for sometime know (20 years or better) and I finally got a chance to incorporate some of what I know into designing and building something I didn't read out of a book

                                        

                                     

                The edge of the top was given a taper to go with the tapered legs.

  The wood I used was pine. The thing about pine and some other woods like cherry is they become blotchy when you stain them. In other words you have some parts that look darker or lighter than the rest of the piece. Which is fine for store bought furniture but not for a custom made piece of fine furniture if you want to be proud of it.
  The end result of what color of stain to use was my daughter's idea and while at first I was hesitant about it I was glad she had the vision of thinking outside the norm of traditional woodworkin

       Yes teal. Add a back to it and several coats of brushed on polyurethane and Wala

  Pretty sure they look better than the desk.

the top to bloodwood jewelry box

I finally took some pics of the top installed. The hinges were not what I wanted but they worked.
The next step will be a tray for small things like rings and necklaces Then some velvet I’m thinking a cream colored velvet.

Bloodwood jewelry box #3

Well everything is going pretty well with the jewelry box . I got the box glued up and the feet attached. Now to finish the top and put some velvet on the inside and install some hinges. This project has not been with out problems though in that the main box wouldn't fit or work with any clamps I had, and the miters didn't come out as nice as I wanted. The chipout that occurred was at least on the inside of the box and I think I can fix that but it is posing some problems also but all in all not to bad.

bloodwood Jewelry box #2

I had to decide on the dimensions I needed to make the box so I could utilize the whole piece of lumber as I didn't want to use any other type of wood for the project. So I came up with 9 1/2 x 4 3/4 width and depth, the height was predetermined by the board being 3 1/2 inches wide. There were a couple of considerations here. One was how much wood I had and two what proportions to use. Well there is a formula in design that is used in most circumstances and that is 1.618, it is sort of a golden rule I read about some where and it works pretty good when designing a project on your own.
The next thing to do was to figure out whether to use some type of feet for it or incorporate feet into it by cutting the sides to look like feet (something that is done on small boxes to keep it looking good yet keeping it simple and cost effective) well I choose the first option since this is a box that I want to be proud of.
The type of feet I came up with were Ogee bracket feet since that was sort of the theme of the design

This is a picture of the design, the template that was going to be used on all 8 pieces ( two per foot) and the size of the actual piece I was going to attempt to make the feet.
I cut the front profile with a ogee shaped router bit on the edge of the board, ripped  it to the width of 3/4"  and cut them to length one side 90 deg and the other end at 45 deg, this way you don't have to do dangerous cuts on the tablesaw . I used a smaller copy of a panel sled to cut the angles and to length (much safer and eliminates tear out).

So this is how they came out after cutting the profile on the bandsaw and gluing the together ( Quite proud of them) .                                                    

Bloodwood jewelry box

I was watching a video the other day on Woodworking-online a website run by the folks from Woodsmith Magazine. They were showing how to make cove cuts on the tablesaw, which I've seen before by a fella name Glen Huey he was showing how to make ogee bracket feet used in furniture making. But what I was intrigued by was if you change the blade angle to something other than 90 deg you end up with a asymmetrical cove cut.
Well I've had this piece of bloodwood (an exotic hardwood from South America) that I've been saving for a special project, this wood is very appropriately named.

So this is the piece with the asymmetrical cove cut
 you can see how it's different than a regular cove cut