Let's take a moment for a couple brief detours.

First, "Goodbye summer." There... it's over.

Hello again! It's time for a little smoke and mirrors... well, mirrors anyway. I've started playing around with the bird's eye veneers to see about the best way to match them for the side panels of the Jeffersonian Book Stand.

I wasn't kiddin' in my last post about the large number of glue joints. Take this one parquetry panel for example; 64 pieces in the checkerboard pattern and 4 pieces in the border. That adds up to a whopping 67 fit/glue operations.

With nearly 300 individual pieces of yellow birch wood and Baltic birch plywood already in the queue for the Jeffersonian Book Stand, you might be able to imagine how many separate glue-ups are involved in the entire process.

I've been eagerly anticipating this part of the project. After so much time spent preparing the substrates, etc., I'll finally be joining together these four sweet yellow birch heartwood veneers to form the top of the lower platform panel on the Jeffersonian Book Stand.

Not so cool. The shop fan is a life saver. Although it's cooler in my basement shop than it is outside, it's still hot. A dew point of 82° F. is more of a don't do point for me.

Step 1, actually shown at the end of last week's post, was to lay out the mortises. I'm using floating tenons, so I'll be cutting mortises into both parts.

Around the photography activity this past week, I've been multitasking my way through several parts of the Jeffersonian Book Stand. Cutting the veneers revealed a very consistent quality to the wood throughout the depth of the planks.

The wood selected for my next piece has been seen before. I'm using off cuts of maple and birdseye maple from the drawers of the Entry Hall Mirror as well as yellow birch from the same plank as the Love Letters Box.

What's the best solution for pressing veneered panels in a small studio?

I promised in my last post to show you a picture of my entry at the Northern Woods Exhibition. Although the piece was well received, as it turns out, some folks couldn't distinguish between my project and its display stand. Oops.

Wow! Lots of people have made there way to the Northern Woods Exhibition. My voice is getting a bit rough after all of the fun conversations this week.

It's time for Minnesota woodworkers to come together for the 28th annual Northern Woods, an exhibition of fine woodworking sponsored by the Minnesota Woodworkers Guild.

The fitting of parts has got to be the most fun there is in fine cabinetmaking. I really mean it. Sharp tools, precise measurements, a little patience; and you're good to go!

The Entry Hall Mirror project has served as a fill-in between other projects. This allows me to always keep busy, but I have to stay alert to make sure the parts are well protected as I move about the shop attending to other things.

50 board feet of red elm has found its way into the studio. These three planks pictured have very straight grain and I can't wait to find a project that can use this amazing wood.

Now that I've returned to the studio after attending the exhibition in Toronto, I feel like it's time to clean-up the place and get back to work.

I find myself embracing the idea of Slow Furniture. The following words might have been written prior to the beginning of the slow furniture movement, but I think James Krenov described the essence of slow furniture when he wrote about "Work that can be traced to the maker, the hand, the eye and the heart."

Do you have a special connection with fine furniture? Will you be in Toronto on June 12th-13th? Please join us as we gather with other furniture makers from Japan, Canada and the U.S. for a joint exhibition of our work.

Studio Tupla's Kwila Sideboard was selected from among 56 entrants to receive the 'Best in Show' award in this year's Northern Woods Exhibition.