Taking a Stand

Elyzabeth reporting.

I know you are all on pins and needles waiting for us to finish our kitchen remodel saga, but I thought I would take a break and show you all a little project I've been working on.  I decided to do a little woodwork and make use of some of the fallen pine branches.

As you may or may not know, our house sits on over an acre of land. All but the part near the house is pretty much as mother nature grew it. We've got an assortment of wild palm trees, cypress trees and long needled pine trees. This whole area used to be swamp land until sometime back in the late 1950's when a developer had the brilliant idea to drain the swamp and sell the land.  Yep, we are living in the middle of "You want to buy some swamp land in Florida?"


All of which brings me to back to the pine.  We have a lot of fallen branches, which given the amount of thunderstorms in the summer, are a bit of a fire hazard.  We've been gathering them up and using them for firewood.

I've been working on hats again lately and I decided I needed to throw together a few more hat stands out of the scrap lumber we have lying around.  And then it occurred to me that I could make a much nicer hat stand out of fallen pine instead of scrap lumber.

I have to say that I love the way they turned out.  Fortunately for me, my husband has a pretty well equipped work shop.  We did all the wood cuts quickly and easily with his big radial arm saw.  I chose parts of the limbs with some interest; knot holes, broken bits and branches.  Stained a nice mahogany and with two coats of urethane, they look amazing.

The part I love the most is the way the surface ends up looking like it has been carved. Well, I guess that's because they have been carved, just by nature, not by people.

By the way, the top picture above, with the rustic brick background is one of the results of my new uber-photoshopping skills.

If you are interested in owning one of these or a similar hat stand, I will be putting some up for sale in our Etsy shop soon.    Feel free to check us out any time at https://www.etsy.com/shop/AnnElyz or you can just click the link at the top of the right sidebar on our blog page.

Regards,
Elyzabeth