Making A Kitchen Knife Block using Bamboo Skewers
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I love innovative ideas, especially when they can enhance our lives, and what better place to do this than in the kitchen. I wish I could take credit for this neat idea, but I suspect it has been around for many, many years it countries where bamboo grows quite prolifically, and has been in use for a variety of building needs for centuries. Building this knife block has been on my list of things to do for about 2 years. So much so that I even went out and purchased (what I thought) would be more than the correct number of packages of bamboo skewers to build this unit. That shows you how wrong I can be sometimes - I had to go out 2 more times to purchase more. The block that I made has take about 20 packages of bamboo skewers. Next time I will be a bit more careful on the size.
To start off, I search through my somewhat extensive collection of cut-off pieces of wood and came up with a few likely suspects. One piece that I like was both figures and somewhat spalted, and it was even a live edge piece. I decided to plane it down enough to see the grain and then to determine if I would have enough wood left if I were to split it into 2 halves, which in fact worked out fine.
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Making kitchen accessories in your workshop is both fun and rewarding because you can frequently make these items for a fraction of what they cost to purchase and they often last much longer, not to mention they can be made to be far more attractive than the run-of-the-mill commercial versions. For many woodworkers making these kitchen and dining accessories can turn into at least a part time and sometimes even a full time job in making these and selling them at craft fairs, swap meets and farmers markets.
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