Benches

I’ve been laying low for the most part and I’m planning to enter real life this January, meaning I will be more involved in volunteering and art projects starting then. I have gotten wrangled into a few events here and there and some of them have been quite time consuming. The latest was my involvement with PULSE this year. I’d been involved in the previous two events for The Children’s Heart Foundation but had planned this year to not help and maybe to just attend the event. It’s a great event where 35 artists create for 8 hours while patrons observe them working and bid on works that are in the process. At the last event I was one of the art chairs as well as an artist and created a pretty fun installation. Everything was going as planned until I met with this year’s art chair at the house and over cheese and good bread I ended up volunteering to make some benches and be an artist’s rep.

The benches are pretty cool looking and I’m very happy how they turned out. They did take up a huge bit of time that I didn’t really plan on giving, but hey I got some benches out of it. Jerry, my mom's partner, was the biggest help in the project because he knows a ton of shortcuts and I had planned on making all these crazy reinforcements which ended up not being necessary. I have a tendency to cut twice and measure once, which usually means getting another piece of wood. Jerry is a measure 3 times cut once with precision and in the long run it saves time and materials. Who would have thought. Jer ended up doing a lot of the construction of the benches and I'm very thankful that he did because what was a 35 hour project could have easily become an 80 project and really more like a 120 hour project if you include my cut twice and measure once variable.

It was really fun seeing the very rough well-worn old growth fir be transformed back and how nice it was to incorporate some the imperfections into the benches. I already have plans to make more of them to possibly sell or to donate.