It’s Been A While!

Back at it!

It’s been several months since the last major post on here.  Thank you to those who stuck with me!  It’s been busy with school starting back up (I’m a teacher in my day job), and I haven’t had much time in the shop as of late.  I have been able to get a few projects done though, so here’s a brief rundown of what I’ve been up to since February.

Mouthpiece Holder

I teach guitar, chorus, and general music right now, but I’ve often taught bands and have many band director friends.  I saw one of them in February, about the time of my last post, and he asked if I could make a wooden stand to hold spare mouthpieces that his students could use.  I told him I could and set to work.  I’ll have a separate post detailing that build coming out soon but for now I’ll post a picture and this brief description.

Wedding Signs

 

Ahhh, wedding season.  My cousin just got married and asked me to make some signs for the reception.  The wooden parts of these barn wood signs was easy enough, with just some simple glue-ups and staining.  One had some nice edging around it but the other three were left a little more rustic looking.  The hardest part of these signs was actually the stencil work.  I don’t have a sticker or vinyl machine, so all of those stencils were hand cut and then painted over the stain.  The process turned out really well and it was the first time I had done stenciling like this.  One tip if you do this yourself, be careful with spacing of the letters if you use individual letters.  The spaces between the letters can be deceiving.

Hall Table

This one isn’t finished yet but it’s the biggest project I’ve worked on since the shoe bench.  This is a picture of the progress so far (turned on its side), and I hope to get done building it soon with a post to follow!

Natural Wood Coasters

These were made for a baby shower.  Originally they were made to set candles on but after the shower I took them and sprayed some waterproof lacquer on them to make them coasters.  To make them, I just cut a tree branch into thin slices using my miter saw.  It got a little tricky in the places where the branch was crooked but it was still a fairly easy project.

Guitar Storage

This was a project I desperately needed at school to house all of the guitars we have for our guitar program.  Before this storage cabinet I had to keep all of the cardboard boxes the guitars came in so that students could put them back in the boxes after we were done playing.  After two classes a day for a few months, those boxes were disintegrating.  My band director colleague was nice enough to share some space in his already cramped band room and this storage unit was born!  I have made a major upgrade to this design since this picture was taken, and I’ll go into more detail in a later post.

Desk Conversion

I bought this old computer desk on Craigslist for $10 several years ago and brought it with me when I moved into this house.  Since then, I’ve known that it wasn’t really functional enough for my space but I hadn’t done anything to fix it.  I decided to add some functionality by getting rid of a shelf I didn’t need and adding some piano hinges to make one side collapsible and a section of the main desk open up for my record player.  Now it fits my needs perfectly and it was just 10 bucks!

Until Next Time!

I hope you got some value out of this post, and I’m looking forward to getting back on schedule with posting.  As always, if you did get value, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.  If you enjoyed it, someone else will too!  Thanks for reading.

-S.A.