I am excited to share a little behind the scenes look at the August edition of MAKE29. These wooden plant stands will go on sale at 8am PST on Friday 8/22. I am thrilled about the return of 3D projects this month and think this second half of the year is going to be pretty fun (and go by quickly!). I hope to finish off this craft (ad)venture strong.
There are 290 plant stands in this edition and each were carved from a solid piece of maple.
I had Jeff and Cherie Kirscheman (see Jeff's construction site here and Cherie's etsy shop here) cut these stands for me, inspired by a vintage wooden stand I found while thrifting last year. This is the same couple who did my ampersands in March so I knew they'd do a great job. They live and work just miles from my house and I am always happy to be able to keep things local to San Diego and support another family business.
Jeff has a giant machine in his workshop that he and his dad built and tweaked over the years so that it can now cut anything to perfection. On a normal day, Jeff uses it to create custom cabinetry. I visited the shop a few weeks ago and was able to watch one plant stand (two interlocking pieces) come to life.
Pretty impressive (and took longer than I expected!).
Each stand was cut one at a time and the machine took two passes to get the cleanest cut possible. After the machine created the shape, Jeff adjusted the notches by hand to make the pieces interlocked perfectly and drilled a hole in the bottom piece so the stands can be held together with a screw. Cherie then sanded each piece.
And then I took over and stained each piece in my garage workshop, taking care to keep the original two pieces partnered up so the wood grain would match in each set.
After a few days of drying, each stand was stamped and numbered.
I'll be shipping them out in three pieces (2 pieces of wood & 1 screw) to reduce their fragility and keep shipping costs down. I'm including a fun "how-to" instruction guide because…why not!?
These were, obviously, pretty time-intensive to create, but they turned out so awesome. You can read more about the product on the listing page here. Thanks for letting me share a peek behind the scenes. I am hoping to do that a bit more these final six months.
enJOY it 
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