Wine Rack

Read Time: 7 mins

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Not everyone has the room, or the budget for a lovely wine room and for those who still like to have a few nice bottles of wine on hand, or to maybe show off some vintage collection, this little wine rack is perfect. It only holds 6 bottles but it is small enough to display your wine collection on a dinning room hutch, a side table, perhaps on a kitchen or serving counter and still look great.
All in all the wine rack is easy to build but there are a few things you need to keep in mind. The first and most important thing is that sizes are critical. In our case we were using 3/8 notches and 3/8" width wood and in order for the wood to fit the notches in a nice snug fit, the wood needs to be milled and sanded to a very accurate width.

The second most important thing to consider is the wood. You need to make sure the wood is a good, quality hard wood and that the grain is tight and straight-grained because it will be holding 6 bottles of wine, so any cross-grain wood will not be good.

Making a Child's Doll Cradle

Read Time: 6 mins

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We all get different kinds of satisfaction from all sorts of different projects. For me, utility projects and furniture have the most appeal but once in a while I like to make things for other members of the family too. In this case, a young niece. Another member of the family hand made a doll's quilt, so to make a complete package a doll was purchased and of course some sort of a bed is needed, so why not a cradled.

Since this is a child's toy I wanted something that would not be too heavy to carry around, yet sturdy and of course easy to clean. The wood I selected was some rough cut Cedar of Lebanon that was well below 12% on the moisture scale. I knew at the outset that this cradle was going to be painted (not by me, I hate covering wood with paint) so I was not so concerned about how the colors of the wood matched up.

As usual, this was a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants project, which means I wasn't working from a formal pattern, so I needed something to work with. I started by measuring the hand made quilt and from that could determine a base for the cradle which would be around 9 by 20 inches on the base and 10 inches in height.

The first order of business is to size the wood which means breaking down the rough cut wood on the jointer, then the planner then the bandsaw and finally back to the planner .... I always love dressing lumber because it's just like a ...

Serving Tray with Holly Inlay

Read Time: 5 mins

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You don't always have to make enormous size wood projects to create something impressive. Sometimes smaller items can be every bit as impressive if you add some creative elements to them, in fact, often they can be better because they can be more portable and used more often, such is the case with our serving tray.

In this article and video we create an ordinary serving tray, but make is a bit more extraordinary by combining different woods and creating a rudimentary inlay in the tray bottom. Remember that this is the kind of an item that will show off your woodworking projects every time it is used so take time to make a good job.

In our case, we started of with 3 kinds of wood. The sides of the tray are something called Locust wood. A hardwood with a prominent yellow tinge to it. For the tray bottom we wanted to use a plywood product because it is more stable and will move only slightly. To add a bit of a WOW factor we selected Holly wood for the inlay as it will contrast nicely with the Mahogany Plywood tray base.  We wanted this project to be

Building a Box Joint Library Cupboard

Read Time: 7 mins

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Book, Magazines, Newspaper clippings, photocopies of wood working projects and pictures. That pretty much describes my woodworking library. Now let me describe where I keep it, in the book case in living room or next to my favorite chair, some in the bedside table, a few others in the workshop, and of course at least a couple of magazines in that place where we all go for a bit of quite time every day.
When it comes time to try and find something that I have bookmarked or need reference to, just finding the magazine, book or photo copy can be a challenge, so I decided it was high time to build a small Library Cupboard for the workshop so I can find things, when I need them. The first thing I did was stack up all by library items in one place to see how much space they take up, then allow for a bit of extra room that will surely be needed in the future.

Since this cabinet is going to be holding a fair bit of weight, I decided that instead of the standard rabbets, I would make the corners of this cabinet as box joints. That way The carcass will be strong enough to hold the books and can still be wall mounted and have doors attached to keep the dust out.
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