TIPS & HOW TO
A family memento
James Jackson
Building a keepsake for my nephew and his bride gave me a woodworking challenge I was eager to accept.
Like many newlyweds, my nephew and his long-time girlfriend are saving for their first home, and their wedding gift of choice was cash. While I was happy to comply by giving them the standard wedding card stuffed with a few bills, I also wanted to build them something they could put inside that home and have as a family keepsake of their special day.
I considered a custom charcuterie board and their wedding date laser-engraved along with their initials, but I’ve built a lot of them over the past year and I wanted to challenge myself to try something new. I also wanted to try out my newest addition to my toolbox, a self-centring dowelling jig.
The gift I opted for was a small coffee or side table with their names engraved on the table aprons along with their wedding date. The table was about 18″ tall, 24″ long and 18″ wide.
This was actually my very first table build and I was inspired by a similar gift my sister received for her wedding about 15 years ago.
Since it was my first table, I wanted to make it a bit easy on myself. I decided I’d find some legs instead of carving or cutting my own.
Fortunately, I’m always on the lookout for things that I can buy now and use later (especially when the price is good) and I had bought some legs more than a year earlier from the local salvage shop. They were white oak and the perfect size and dimensions.
I wanted the aprons to match the legs, so I hit up the local hardware store and bought some 3/4″ thick by 2-1/2″ wide boards, and this is where the dowelling jig came into play. I used it to drill two holes at the top of the legs and at the end of the boards and used some wooden dowels to secure them together.
This was, of course, after I used my CNC machine to carve “Lindsay & Brennan” into each of the longer aprons, and the wedding date into the shorter aprons. I then used black cyanoacrylate (CA) glue to fill in the cavity and make the font flush with the oak boards.
For the top, I didn’t want to repeat the same white oak look, so I looked around at what I had on hand. You might recall from one of my earlier articles that I have a longstanding love for barnboard, and I had a hunch it would fit well with the couple’s decorating esthetic (they were married last October in the woods on my sister’s farm property just outside of Brockville, Ontario, and had their reception in the barn).
I found a perfect board that was about 10″ wide and had just enough length to allow me to cut it in half and glue the two pieces together (again using my new dowelling jig to help align the boards and give the top some strength). I finished the entire piece with a non-toxic finishing oil that will produce a deeper, darker patina over time.
There were a few things I’d clean up about the design or that I’d do differently next time, but it was a fun weekend challenge and made a great gift that will hopefully be around for generations.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to stick around the next day for the opening of the gifts since I still had a five-hour drive ahead of me and, well, let’s just say we all had a late start to the morning after a long night of partying. But I received a text later that day from Brennan’s father to thank me for the table and to say what a special gift it was. I received a thank you card in the mail a few weeks later from the happy couple expressing that same sentiment.
It’s at this point that I would usually make a self-deprecating comment to them about how it was my first table and that they’d better be careful with it and they should probably only use it to hold light things like a small houseplant or a few magazines to avoid it falling in on itself – but I’ve also learned it’s sometimes better to bite my tongue and just take the compliment.
