Thanks Scott, I wish it were going a little quicker, but many/most of the techniques used to create this little table are new to me and that's required a lot of trial and error, practice and head scratching. But that's cool, it's been interesting and many of these techniques I can use from here out.

As far as sand shading goes, yes, I went out and got a hotplate and a cast iron skillet the other day. Now all I need is some adequate sand. I have a couple bags of playsand in our garden shed but I'm concerned it might be too coarse. I'm thinking of stopping in our local PetCo and seeing if they don't have some fine aquarium sand. If that doesn't work I guess I'll go the google/net route.

Rick

Cal, yes, I understand exactly what you're getting at and you pose some excellent questions.

First let me mention a couple things. A. I know absolutely squat about carving tools. B. The gouges I have I bought last year on an impulse from Grizzly. These are made in Japan and are a Japanese style chisel.



As you can see I've marked these for my own convenience, the sizes are the closest approximation, they're actually metric, but I'm too old and stubborn to jack around with millimeters and such.

I have no way at present to tell you what the sweep is or anything, they just are what they are.

Anyway, these do a nice job of punching out petals from holly veneer. But when it comes to working the surface of a leg it's been a different story. As you mentioned if I hold them straight up the outside edge of the recess gets bruised and it's not acceptable. When I try to hold it at an angle it doesn't work very well either, especially if the chisel is being used to remove all the material. What I've found works fairly well is too trace around the petal in pencil and then to route out most of the waste with a 1/16" spiral bit. Then I can go in with an exacto knife and the chisels and finish up. It's kinda time consuming, but it's the best I've come up with so far.

I'm sure if I had chisels better suited to the task it'd be easier and probably quicker, but I'm trying to use what I have and I'm not sure what chisels would be best anyway.

Well, that's what I'm looking at for now, someday I'd like to acquire more chisels but at present I'm not comfortable selecting any.

Rick

Rick,
Petco will have the sand you need. Look in the reptile area. If they have plain white sand grab that not the colored stuff, obviously. The reptile sand if very fine grains. good for sand shading. Good luck.

Table is looking awesome!

Thanks Barry, and you're right, Petco had the exact sand I wanted, and yes it's for reptiles. I don't think I've ever seen sand this fine before. Only issue I had when I fired the hot plate up this afternoon was that I put too much sand in the skillet and it took about 45 minuets before it was hot enough to shade the holly. But it works, so kind of like with my glue pot I just need to be thinking ahead a little before I use it.

Rick

Rick,

Regional design on bell flowers is as follows.


In NE area the center pedal goes first referencing of the center. Then if you are working on the left leg you add the right pedal taking part of the right side of the center pedal. The left pedal is next and this pedal will take what ever is left on center pedal and some random amount of the right pedal. You will have to do the opposite on the right legs. On right legs center pedal, left pedal, right pedal.

Now if you look at southern furniture say Baltimore you will have to inlay the left and right pedal and then the center. Yet I think you will be really happy if the pedals lay partly on top of each other verses butting each other.


Fred

Good Luck!!!!!

Good morning Freddy

I kinda knew some of that about petal placement but I certainly wasn't aware of all of it, thanks.

I think I'm going to go with the center placement of the longest one, as in placing it in last. This just seems to look better to me. I also think I'll shade the bottom portions of the side petals and the top portion of the center one.

Freddy, let me ask you, when doing something such as bell flowers what is your preferred method of excavating the background when inlaying them?

Rick

looking good jefferson!! its coming along

man this thread has been awesome from the beginning...i like seeing the different styles in which we work ...the play by play forum is allot of fun...good job man..i am looking forward to seeing this piece completed....

I'm still enjoying this thread, too, Rick. It's great watching your methods and I'm learning a lot. Keep the posts coming.

The tool to remove the bulk of the background is DREMEL. DREMEL! DREMEL! I had a furniture maker making a Seymour sideboard repro that subbed out the legs to me and I used the Dremel. I inlayed over two hundred pedals and all the stringing and cuff banding in 1 1/2 days. Now the dremel does 99% of the work & the rest is done with a triangular tip router plane blade. Lie Nielsen sells one or make your own with a allen key. Have fun.

Fred

Snake, Tommy, Cody & Freddy, thanks for the kind words fellas, I appreciate it. A little encouragement from the ranks always helps.

Freddy, I'm glad you said you used the dremel on inlaying petals and such, because my method at the moment is using my trim router with a 1/32" spiral cutter in it. It works good and I can get back in the corners with the micro bit and that saves a lot of hand clean up. I had a chance to work on bellflowers a bit today and it's starting to settle into a system, I should have them done tomorrow.

First I lay everything out with my little story stick and with my sliding bevel and try square......





After some trial and error, I've settled on a system to wear I lay out my lines, then trace the first 5 petals. Then I route the small bottom petal first along with the side petals on the right side. These 3 get glued in at the same time.



Then it's on two the other two side petals...........



Then I can finish by putting in the two long center petals......



More soon, I promise.

Rick

Rick,

I haven't checked in for a while... and wow... the table is looking great. Nice work on the stringing and bellflowers. They really look crisp.

Have you given any thought to the banding on the cuffs yet?

Can't wait to see more...

Whit

So 1st of all great job. The bell flowers look great. Now what angle are you using for the outside pedals?? What is your spacing??? What are using for the cuff??? Awesome Job again.

Fred

I gotta say the great job ... But now what attitude that we all have come accustom to here make me proud ... It's always about the how and why ... Awesome!!!!

Okay, Smitty, good to see ya bro. The feet will have black socks 3" up and on top of that will be the cuff which is the same as the one I used on the apron. You know, the one Cal said reminded him of Purina Dog Chow.
I'm really hoping that tomorrow I can take the legs to the jointer and make the reliefs for the black socks. then the cuff banding will tie between those and the stringing.

I gotta tell ya, these bell flowers have been tedious and time consuming. I ended up with ten faces that got the entire treatment.

But I'm slowly getting there, only have the 4 pateraes to do after that.

Rick

Thanks Fred, the outside petals are centered at 22.5 degrees.

Basically from my top piece of curved stringing I'm coming down 3/4" to start the large bell flower, from the bottom of it there's a 1/2" gap to the medium sized bell flower and then another 1/2" gap to the small single petal.

The cuff as I said will be the same as the apron and then the leg finishes out the last 3" in black.

Rick

Rick,

You progress is looking great. Keep up the awesome work.

Rat

Thanks Bruce But to be honest I should have been done with this by now, I've allowed trepidation of some of the untested techniques to lead to procrastination, that doesn't help anything. Each step that I've worried over I eventually just ended up jumping into anyway. I might as well just do that as they arise instead behaving like a wimp and sulking about it. It took over a week to actually do these bell flowers on the legs. I should have knocked all of those out on one Saturday. Sheesh.

Rick

Bell flowers are done, finally. I really need to find a better method of doing these. My trim router works fine, but when excavating something this small I really struggle to see what I'm doing. It seems the base of the router blocks too much light and I can only get my face so close, so I end up having trouble judging depth, especially on the far side of what I'm routing, as in the side opposite from where I'm actually at. This leads to a lot of hunt and peck and that's both slow and aggravating. But enough whining. As I said they're done and I don't think they look too bad, the wife likes them and it is her table.

They still need cleaned up, but I'm not going to do much of that until some other stuff is in. I also notice that my shading doesn't show up much in my pics, maybe the flash is washing it out. I also noticed on my test leg that when I gave it a coat of BLO that the shading seemed more pronounced.



Rick

"Ask not for whom the Bell (flowers) tolls. It tolls for thee". Nice job Rick. Does wifey have a spot picked out to display your masterpiece when you are done?

Bruce,

Nice. You know Bruce, For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of my favorite books of all time. I must have read it half a dozen times over the years.

Yeah, she's going to use it as a sofa table, our couch sits out in the middle of the room and she wants a table to put her purse on when she comes through the front door.

Rick

Shall I be "Ernest?".. Ok, so I'm not Robert Jordan fighting the Spanish Faciist, blowing up bridges, but hey, I can still destroy good wood without trying to hard.

Bruce

Just don't be drinking any absinth while doing it, mkay.

Rick

No, I pour that for my wife of 33 yrs. Absinth doth make the heart grow fonder.

LOL

Well my table legs were getting cold feet so it was time to put some socks on em. I know, lame, but I couldn't resist.

I'm using some of the black dyed costello veneer I got from Berkshire. I really like the look of this stuff, but it's kind of brittle and splintery.

First I had to relieve the area where the socks go so the veneer stays in plain with the rest of the leg. I did this on the jointer with a stop block. This is a very easy operation once you've found the proper depth.







Then using hot hide glue I simply glue these on one at a time and clamp for about 10 minuets. The hide glue is perfect for this as it sets quickly and allows me to trim and move on. Not being a genuine purist I trimed these with a trim router and a flush trim bit. Pretty easy.





Now that the socks are done, I'm ready to put in the banding that falls between the socks and the bottom of the stringing. Just to be safe I inlet a piece of the banding into one of my practice pieces. I just scored the edges with a sharp box knife, then routed out the bulk of the material with my trim router, then cleaned it up with a chisel and my non-tailed router.





Once I get the banding installed on the real legs I'll have more to show, maybe tomorrow.

Rick