Six Fifty Four Book Shelf
- A commissioned piece, Six Fifty-four is a set of shelves made of Paulownia and Osage Orange. More Pictures on Flickr.
72″ wide x 22″ deep x 84″ high
The Paulownia, a widely-distributed non-native tree, was growing in the backyard of a Capitol Hill (DC) property owned by the client. When he took the tree down, he saved the rather substantial trunk, allowing it to air-dry in a sheltered location for a few months.
Early in 2008, he took the log to the Hungerford Brother Sawmill near Germantown, Maryland. Remus Hungerford sliced the log into 6/4 and 8/4 slabs which the client then took home and stacked in the Horse walk (a narrow. covered alley) of the house from which the log had come. About a year after cutting it, he figured out what to do with it. Sort of. He knew he wanted shelves for his new home, but was unclear on the configuration. The bottom one needed to be low and wide, so that it could double as a bench; this also meant that the second shelf had to be 40-50′ above the second. We decided that a third shelf was needed, but that a fourth might be impractical.
Jamal, the client, has had a long-standing appreciation of Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera), a wonderfully dense, rot-resistant, deeply colored, and resilient wood. He has been spending much time on a friend’s Southern New Jersey farm recently. The farm is peppered with rows of old Osage Orange trees; there have been widely planted as wind-breaks and hedges. Jamal took a few of the larger branches home and began to wonder if i could incorporate them into the shelving somehow. Since I had just finished the Arm-Chair, Singular, this had an immediate appeal.
The Paulownia worked relatively easily; it is light and mostly straight grained. I had to be careful around the knots, and the wood dents easily, but it was quickly shaped. With the Osage Orange I used the same organic approach I use on the split-rail chairs. I knocked off most of the bark, then shaped the branches with drawknife and spokeshave before hitting the rough spots with a small belt sander (he has two girls, and I wanted to make sure that there was no chance of splinters). In some places I took the wood down to it’s rusty orange heart, in others I left some of the gray, weathered surface; I wanted and loved the variety. My favorite spots were where black cracks ran through fully finished areas, and where I left some of the moss on.
Technorati Tags: handmade, handcrafted, furniture, osage, paulownia, artisianl