The Prayer Wall Table Version 2.0
more function, form & art
What is it?
Okay…yeah…soooooo after being in the store for just about a week, the Sunflower Table by The Prayer Wall, um, well, sold? What is puzzling, is that it wasn’t even for sale. It even had a sticker on it saying that it was for display only and threatened great violence if anyone tried to buy or steal it. Okay, that last part isn’t true, but it was only made to be used at the prayer wall and was a test of a random idea that I had bouncing around in my head for a while.
Well, the good folks at LVM put a temporary table in it’s place, while I shook my head and rattled around the other ideas knocking around up in that cavernous abyss. Last year, a gentleman posted on Facebook that he had a Mulberry tree that had fallen and was offering some of the wood for free. I never worked with Mulberry before, so I acquired some of it, milled it up, and dried it out. From that, I also made some nice wood cookies that show off the yellowish-brown grain. The grain and color are so beautiful and, because I don’t have a ton of it, I’ve been reluctant to use it…until now!
Fortunately, the cookie was already flattened and dry. It just needed some sanding to take out the milling marks. While I love natural wood finishes, I wanted to pay homage to it’s predecessor and use an epoxy finish. We left the live edge on the slab and cleaned off the bark and more rotten parts with grinders, flap sanders, and RO sanders. I was careful to leave much of the natural character of the slab / tree, while refining it just a bit.
A couple of months ago, I was browsing Facebook Marketplace and came across an interesting looking wood. As I often do, I bookmarked it and kept browsing. That wood haunted my dreams. It had a very strange and different texture. The beams also kept popping up in my Marketplace feed. It was some engineered support beam leftovers that a nice couple had left from a garage build. It was a good price and, in my typical form, while I had immediate plans to use the wood, my mind was astir with ideas! So I bought it. And now the time came to actually use it.
While I loved the organic feel of the Sunflower Table’s leg, I wanted the curves of this table’s leg to be more subtle. The engineered beam’s wood also could give it this effect and look like the base was somehow “feeding” the Mulberry slab on top. So I made some small-scale prototypes of different leg curves and consulted my invaluable woodworking muse, Mrs. Woodworking. We settled on curve you see in the pictures below.
After the epoxy cured for the tabletop and the leg was formed and sanded, it needed a base to keep the table upright and stable…but I was stumped (pun intended). I felt like the table and leg stem meshed well and had a naturalistic feel. But any base I put on it just stuck out like a sore thumb. Round was too boring, square was to “unnatural”, and other shapes just didn’t cut it. So I again consulted the Great and Powerful Muse, Mrs. Woodworking.
I told her my dilemma, why I didn’t like any of the shapes I tried, and pleaded with her to help me (ish). She looked at the table, looked at me, and, as if it was an obvious matter of fact, she pointed to the square base and said, “couldn’t you just project the shape of the top onto that square, trace it, and cut it out so that the base is the same shape of the table?”
(I wish you could see the dumb look on my face at that moment and right now as I wright this)
Yeeeaah. That’s like both perfect and genius. It creates like a shadow of sorts of the top and carries the shape to the floor…kind of like a tree’s trunk does. My jaw is still ajar… lady has brilliance! Totally blessed.
With a bit of shaping, sanding, rounding, and sanding again, the base took form. Topping it off with a couple coats of homemade wipe-on poly and a topcoat of warm gloss poly, the table was done. What interests me about this is that the Sunflower Table had taken me weeks to make. Granted it wasn’t constant work, just an evening here and a Saturday there, but it was 3-4 weeks nonetheless. This one? It took five evenings and one Saturday and it’s done. Crazy, right? But it’s awesome that a week after the Sunflower Table sold, a new table took it’s place on my birthday.
In Closing…
God’s plans and His journey for us intrigues and surprises me every day. I’m so thankful that He lets me share the gifts He’s given me with others and there are some who appreciate what goes into these pieces. I so love the grain pattern of this table and the engineered wood leg / based just give it so much life. Especially since the wood in the base / leg have green Poplar streams in it.
eesh…I just remembered…I forgot to put a “not for sale” sticker on this table…
