Here’s the latest creation to come out of my workshop. It’s a bedside table for our guest room and I made it out of a beautiful piece of figured Arbutus wood (the other half of the board I used for the entry bench a year or so ago). One of the issues I had to overcome with this piece was that although the lumber is stunningly beautiful it did have some pretty massive defects in it. The figure is the result of tension in the wood and the grain direction changing all over the place. This tension caused some very large voids to open up in the wood during the drying process. I didn’t think it would look good to just fill them with epoxy and bowties wouldn’t have really made much sense either as there weren’t cracks to hold together. I decided to inlay some geometric shapes over the voids and make it a feature of the piece. I’m calling it the “Triangle Side Table”. For the pull I wanted to stick with the triangle theme so I made it look like a triangle stuck in to the wood. The pull and all of the inlay are made from Jarrah. The drawer is also made from a straighter grained piece of Arbutus. I used half-blind dovetails at the front of the drawer which were a bit challenging in this very hard and highly figured wood. But I’m happy with how they turned out. I wanted to keep the base simple and I originally turned some legs to make something similar to the round table I just made for our living room. But when I put it together it didn’t look right at all. Back to the drawing board I went and came up with this even cleaner look using Black Walnut. I think with such a crazy piece of wood the base just needed to be as simple as possible.

Submitted: January 2021