Fuctional things are easy on my brain.

       So my thesis show for my MFA at Tulane is March 2nd -11th.   I don't know the date of the reception yet but that isn't the point.  The point is that thought runs through my head like a scary, exciting but mostly scary ALARM BELL.  A couple times most days, this is extra stressful right now because Tulane's furnaces are cold for the summer.  My brain knows casting right now would be kinda awful but it doesn't prevent the anxiety.  Normally when I am stressed in the studio, I blow glass cups.  It's easy, I can do it by myself and you end up with a finished product.  But our furnaces are cold, you see its starting to become a cyclical problem.  So I thought to myself what other processes to I find intrinsically soothing.  
       Cold working, did a couple days of that but it wasn't doing the trick, and it takes forever to get to a finished product.  Then I remember that, I am perhaps best at production wood working, two years of building big furniture grade crates 40 hours a week and that is not quite 10000 hours but it's a ways towards mastery.  So I snagged some of the wood from the junk pile by my neighbors house and bought a 22 dollar piece of plywood and made a big old mess.  I am gonna walk you through the whole process of one of the tables I made.

 A half sheet of cheap 3/4 in plywood.  I have a truck this week so it was even easy to get the shop

 Then I ripped the plywood down into an obsessive amount of 1 and 3/8 inch strips.  The planner in our shop doesn't work right now so I was just planning on laminated them together and using the table saw to get them down to the one inch thickness I wanted.

Next I used a staple gun and a bunch of wood glue and laminated the strips together.  The clamps are not strictly needed but they will squeeze any tiny gaps left after the stapling and gluing process.  

 I trimmed the my plywood end grain board I had made to fit a piece of glass I had cast this spring.  

For the legs I cut my strips at about 3 inches, so I could end up with four 3" x 3"  plywood legs

More gluing, stapling and clamping

Now I put the base of the table together, you don't see the connections so I glues, screwed and stapled.

Sometimes things are easier to assemble upside down.

   

 It needs is a bit more sanding and a light stain and some poly.   Oh and photographs not taken with my phone.  

 This is the table I made first using just reclaimed pine that I left pretty rough and the parts I did cut I took an acetylene torch to rough back up and make the weathered coloring.  It also needs some sort of a finish but I don't actually know how to finish something that's all toothy and weather.  But I have been asking the Internet some pointed questions and will do some tests.