Kitchen Table - June / July 2010 (and a little turning for the Dangerous Mezzo)

I'm going against my usual and I'm posting something that's bang up to date!
The last couple of weekends I've been working on my kitchen table.  I ordered the wood a few months ago but had been busy on other things.

It was actually pretty quick to do as I'd ordered the wood from Wood Supplies again so it was all the right size, I just had to cut to length.

I had seen a magnetic jig idea in two articles, one in the free AIM magazine (If you've never heard of it it's quite a good little mag, published monthly online and with articles from members of Artisans in Miniature : http://www.artisansinminiature.com/index.html) and the other was in one of the other dollshouse magazine.

I thought it was a great idea - the very basic version is you get a piece of steel - baking tray or steel tea tray, stick down a sheet of graph paper and then, to keep your furniture or whatever square while it's gluing, you use the graph paper to line it up and then the magnets hold it in place.
I bought some door catches quite cheap from the local DIY store which have a really good pull to them.  Ideal.

In the end I found a shop on ebay selling a magnetic board with grid already marked out which was for crafts, making cards or holding down cross stitch patterns etc which sounded ideal.

It turns out it is perfect.  I stuck some small, but very powerful, magnets we had onto the bottom of two pieces of wood I'd bought to form a right angle corner and then the rest could be lined up to that.

I made the base frame of the table, with the legs first, as Georgian tables usually had a shelf for storage of pots and pans etc.  

You can see the grid of the steel sheet and the magnets in the photo above.

I then cut the pieces for the shelf and stuck those on:

The top was fairly easy.  Cut a sheet and chamfered the top edges then stuck that to the top.

The finishing touch was to add a frame under the top, between the legs:

And there we have it, a basic Georgian kitchen table.  Just need a few kitchen items to go on top!


Now, as a special treat for the Dangerous Mezzo, because she asked, her is a little vase I turned a few weeks ago, that for once, looks like it was supposed to look!
It's made from a small part of a Yew pen blank and polished.  It's actually darker in colour than the picture suggests - a rich brown.  It's not perfect, you can see the edges round the top are a bit chipped, but I'm still learning :)