Project Jumanji: Christmas Craft Exchange

Oh the weather outside is… weather :) It's about that time of year again, when we start to freak out about the snow, and about the Christmas shopping, and about the Christmas eating and socializing… how will we fit it all in!?

A few weeks ago, I finally remembered to ask my girlfriend, Grandma Kelso, just what it would take for her to make me some crocheted dish cloths. She's a super amazing crocheter (hunh, that's a word), and our cloths from Mom needed some extra friends in the rotation. My payment was to be "one crafty item that fits in a Canada Post envelope". Challenge accepted!

This was my first attempt at a butcher block cutting board / cheese board. I enjoyed making it, and hope that it holds up okay. I took five pieces of oak that had been cut to length, I glued them together and then started sanding them all to flush. It was actually quite a satisfying task, although I ran into two challenges.

The first one was that I didn't have a way to cut the ends to angles so that the cutting board can actually be picked up once you've loaded stuff onto it. The second challenge was that I had originally planned on staining a chevron pattern onto it (sorry K!).

The first challenge was easily (albeit anxiously) conquered once I purchased my NEW TABLE SAW! Whee! Haha. It was kind of scary to put it together, only because the instructions were nearly in a foreign language… but I got it together, and did a few test pieces. It's really powerful, and I managed to keep all my fingers, this time.

Pretty angle…. pretty crappy cell phone picture, sorry!

The second challenge I didn't overcome. Le sigh. I tested staining only certain parts of a few different pieces of spare wood, but I didn't find a way to get any nice crisp lines. I know how to do it with polyurethane, but in order to use poly on a kitchen block, you have to let it cure for over 30 days and I wanted to get this in the mail in time for the holidays.

I made the grain opposite on each piece to accent the wood