Second Nightstand

Hi all,

This is about woodworking again: the second nightstand.  I start with the same basic carcase: one drawer and a roomy storage area which will have doors.  This time the doors will have a sea foam/ sand motif.

Now, for all of these projects, I get a lot of help from various issues of Fine Woodworking.  Fine Woodworking from June 2003 had an article "Engineering a Chest of Drawers" by Will Neptune which showed me how to set up a basic carcase.  Then in Fine Woodworking Decemmber 2008 there was a great article "The Right Drawer for Your Project" by Matthew Teague
which showed me how to design and build various kinds of drawers and gave good advice on how to fit them into the drawer opening so you hear a slight "whoosh" when you close the drawer and the air is pushed out.
This post is about the carcase but looking a bit ahead, I used American Woodworker from February 1998's article "Sleigh Bed" by Randy Sorenson for my sleigh bed design.  But that is for another post.

The Fine Woodworking issue December 2008 also had an article "how did they do it: Man or Machine" by Annissa Kapsales which profiled the work of Duncan Gowdy in which he build a side cabinet whose doors held a sea foam/ sand relief carving design.  It was a emotionally moving piece as he used a photo of the beach where he had cast his mentor's ashes out into the surf as the model.

Note he has 4 doors and I only want 2 so I clearly need to modify the design a bit.  He also uses recessed hinges and small hidden drawer pulls while I want to use those nice adjustable hinges with nautilus pulls.  He carved and scooped out the sea foam parts after bleaching the wood.  He then stained the sand parts with a bit of dark umber so that he achieves a kind of silhouette effect.  Anyway, I was so impressed with this wonderful piece of art, I wanted to use the idea on the second nightstand.

First, I built all of the nightstand; the drawer and the doors.  Installed the top with purpleheart edging and fitted the doors.  Then I popped off the doors so I could do the drawing.  I freehand drew the design on my two doors on paper which looked like this vertically on the doors.

On my table saw, it looked like this.

I then woodburned through the paper and then since it was faint still, I woodburned it again.

Then I shaded the sand areas with a pencil and used my router to route around all the dark areas with an 1/8" bit.  After that I used a gouge to scoop out along the routed edges to create a more rounded look.  So along each dark area edge, the profile looks like

dark edge -- routed channel -- rounded and scooped out area -- interior of foam.

Also, Pauli and I decided we wanted a large sand area on the lower right so I adjusted the routed areas and so forth to give a solid lower right hand corner.

At this point, Pauli applied Watco and then after three days, the painting began.  The sea foam was applied as a white paint wash and the sand color used  a yellow ochre one.   Here is the first draft.

Then after looking at it awhile, we decided to add a blue wash to everything.  I also added a bit of dark umber to the sand again.
Here is the second draft setup on my drafting table in the bunny mansion -- the art studio I build years ago in the back yard.

Here is the nightstand with the doors back on in a close up.

Here is it stepping back a bit.  Now the varnish is not on yet, but it is getting close to the final product.

Then we decided to add a blue wash to the drawer.  So here are two final images before we varnish.  This is a front on view.

And this is one showing the top.

Now all we have to do is varnish and bring it in the house!
That's all for now.