The Sunflower Prayer Wall Table
Function Meets form and art
What is it?
I’ve long had an idea for a table in mind. The picture in my head takes different forms, but it is a combination of geometric shapes and epoxy. The shapes create the form and the epoxy is the binder that holds it all together. Some versions even have metal rods or wood bowties connecting the shapes. I hadn’t built any of the ideas because 1. I don’t have a place to store any of them and 2. there’s not enough room in our shop to place them for sale.
Well, if you’ve seen our other post about the prayer wall, we finally had a place and a purpose for one of these ideas to come to life!
Like a lot of our projects, they start off with an idea or a group of ideas. However, when the build begins, I’ll often form the core pieces, in this case, chunks of hexagon wood, and let the pieces kind of speak into what comes next. Sounds kind of non-committal and wishy-washy, doesn’t it? But it often works out to some really fun or cool outcomes, and that’s what happened here!
So as I laid out the hex blocks onto the table, I arranged them in different ways. At one point, I arranged them into a circle and saw a familiar-looking shape…a sunflower. But that was only in my head. So how do I communicate that picture to others? A little bit of wood dye did the trick! I dyed them to match the colors of our logo, filled in some gaps on the edges with some wedges (rhyming accidental), and darkened the center. But it looked incomplete…
A clear epoxy would raise the aesthetic to a more modern look, but I wanted cohesion, harmony, all of the symmetric pieces to somehow be bound together. Clear, transparent lines in-between the pieces would not achieve that. But and epoxy background, in the lighter brown color (again, like our logo) would do just that. So we mixed some up and poured it in.
A few hours into the curing process, when the light brown epoxy was firming up, we poured in the clear epoxy to fill it in and cover the wood. An unintended consequence was what happened between the two layers. The brown was not as set as I thought. So it slowly and gently blended with the clear layer, creating a fog / cloud-like zone where the two epoxies met. It is such a cool effect!
For the leg, I often hear that if you have a statement in the tabletop, make the leg plain. If you have a statement table base, make the tabletop plain. I don’t know who said it, but I’m a slow learner, hard-headed, and non-conforming by nature. Even when I sometimes know the outcome is at risk of being a huge flop by ignoring conventional wisdom, I’ve got to see it for myself. I’ve seen a technique for making an organic, wavey leg from a solid square column of wood and was eager to try it. So I figured why not!
A sunflower’s stem isn’t straight (but the pedals aren’t hexagons either, are they?). They are curved, sometimes switching back and forth from base to top. So I took a 4'‘x4” (100cm x 100cm) Black Locust post and tried the technique. While the resulting stem was a little more wavey than the picture in my head, it worked. Finished with a homemade wipe-on poly and top-coated with semi-gloss poly, the stem struck the right balance with the top. Adding one more feature to the table is the fact that the base glows under a blacklight. That’s right! Black Locust is one of many wood species that glow under this type of light. Check it out in the pictures!
In Closing…
Sometimes God plants a seed in our minds and it spreads roots throughout until one day the sprout comes out of our head. For those who think that last sentence is poetic, thank you. For those how read that statement and started imagining a sci-fi horror movie, you’re as twisted as me and I also thank you. But this is one of those seeds. I still have other ideas knocking around for making other tables with some geometric shapes. For now, I am so thankful and happy with this one. I’m excited for it to go into the store and humbled and blessed that people will be able to fill out their prayer requests on top of it.
