KNITTING SHELVES

My wife knits every day. She likes to switch projects constantly, in order to break up the monotony. Because of this, she always has over a dozen baskets and bags full of projects in the works.

It would have been way too easy to build her an upright shelf to put all these on. I knew I had to come up with something unique for her, since she is such a unique person! (The wall is not curved. It just gives that appearance when taking a panoramic picture. The panoramic shot was necessary in order to get in the entire word in one shot.)

The shelves were going to need to be 13” deep and wide for the biggest baskets to fit. Realizing how much wood this was going to take, I decided to repurpose some ¾” oak from an entertainment center and an oak table top, rather than buy that much plywood. This created more work, since the two woods were stained totally different colors.

After sanding the wood stain all down, it was still obvious that the colors, left in the grain of the oak, was still different. Not a problem though. I decided this would be a perfect time for me to try out a new woodworking style that I hadn’t used yet. The method called “Shou-sugi-ban” is burning wood with a torch. Using a weed burner torch, I lightly scorched the plywood. This burned all the grains in the plywood, so that you didn’t see any of the old stain colors.

I ripped some solid oak to make a thin veneer to cover the open edges of the plywood. A small torch is used to detail the narrow edges.

After applying a black cherry stain, the scorched grain really popped, bringing out a much more noticeable contrast than it would have, if it had just been new untouched plywood. To make the lettering of the shelves more noticeable, I added a ¾’ strip of white painted boards on the fronts.

Here is a picture showing me cutting a slot in the “N” panels, for adding a spline to glue the panels together.

I made some hooks to hang bags with.

2 ½” pocket hole screws, lined up with the studs, are used to hang the shelves. Hiding the pocket holes on the very top and the very bottom, conceals the screws from sight.

The 45 degree cuts on the letter “G” were made at alternating lengths between the oak and the white boards. This allowed the overlapping 45s to strengthen the glue up. Dowels were used to hold the joints on the “K”. The “G” and the “K” have keyhole slots for hanging on screws.

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