Our Provo Souvenir

We have a triumph to declare.  We recently turned this:

into this:

Okay, not quite.  But pretty close.  We didn't dye ours a mocha color, Lauren didn't want turned legs, and we decided not to bend the back of the crib.  But we do have the pictures of the crib we made below.

We built it with some ash wood that came from an ash tree around the corner from our house in Provo. Our neighbor saw the ash trees being cut down and convinced the city to give the wood to him and knowing I was planning to build a crib he gave some to us. Thanks, Jeff!  I really enjoyed trying some new techniques on this project such as the laminate bending for the arms, and cutting the molding on the table saw.   Lauren did an amazing amount of work on this crib by putting in hours and hours--tens of hours--of sanding. She surprised me once by sanding the molding all the way smooth and getting out all of the table saw blade marks. When I came home from work I was very surprised. Unfortunately it gave her blisters because she did so much. she was a trooper.

Oh, also, the raised panels are maple. We had to buy some maple to make those, everything else came from the local ash. We were talking with someone about it--though I forget who it was now--and they asked where the wood came from.  We answered, "a tree."  The person gave us a shocked look, then the look turned into, "duh" and said something like, "for a minute I thought that you got it from a tree you chopped down or something.  But of course all wood comes from trees."  We then said, no, the wood really did come from a tree like that.  It came from around the corner about two blocks.  We had to let it air dry before working with it. We have a few figured pieces of maple and Lauren, like me, loves the figured pieces of wood.