Welcome to Medullary Ray

https://www.etsy.com/shop/Perfect45Degree Installation day of one of my latest dine tables this year. 16' Guanacaste Parota slab dine table. What a beautiful piece of wood to work with! The muralist is still working on the ceiling above the table and the electrician has a light fixture to install. Yikes! All is well and worked out as planned! My client is still in the phases of finishing their new Vancouver home but special guests from around the world are due to visit so we install the table to help fill out the room!   We wanted to keep the live edge as an interesting element but straight cut the other three sides to work with the lines and shape of the room. Just sitting at this table is a treat!     The grain in this wood is phenomenal! It's like flying over the earth! Left: One of the base ends nearly ready to assemble. The base is built out of Shedua. Curved work is one of my true loves! Below: Building up th...

self portrait, Jacquelyn Smith Whether you make wooden spoons, modern coffee tables, or far out executive desks, being a woodworker is interesting work on many levels. We do work with dead plant material which has many challenges. It's a nice mix of technical, creative, deliberate and happenstance. Want to try it out? Take a class at a community center or college that has some tools and give it a shot. If you are fortunate there may be a woodworking school nearby. If you get serious here are a few pointers to keep in mind . . . Just when you are convinced you know most things about the work, something presents itself to show you otherwise. It doesn't really matter how long you've been at it. There are very few shortcuts. When you feel the urge, resist. What's the saying . . ."do it right, once". The resources we use do have a limit. Your life and energy are precious. What we create can carry on and inspire many if we are present and respectful of ...

LIFE is FULL of NATURAL COLOR!  There's NO STAIN on this Outside Dine Table made from Reclaimed wood by Perfect45Degree The reclaimed wood in this gorgeous dine table has literally been around the world. It has crossed the mighty seas. Yes, somewhere around the globe someone cut down trees and milled this beautiful hardwood into 4" x 4" sticks so they could stack heavy railroad rails. They shipped the rails from the other side of the planet. Still an amazing concept for me when I visualize our globe and all of the land and water between me and the South Seas. Just think of all of the conversations that have taken place next to, over and under this wood. How many languages? Were the trees near a path or road? Somehow this wood has ended up here, in my town, for sale, thrown randomly into a plywood box as if it were Popsicle sticks. Five dollars each. 36"wide, 9'2" long (divided into four sections) with an angle iron base It was w...

Work is flowing in and out of the shop!  Here is a recent custom project I have been designing and building for an awesome client in Austin, TX. He wants to 'wow' his wife with this incredibly meaningful gift. Click here for more info about this piece Together they traveled to Scotland and saw the Kelpie tombstone below. We used this image for the main inlay in the top. Every bit of inlay supports the water horse and Celtic theme. I even carved the pulls like waves of water.  The box turned out beautifully! The Kelpie (water-horse) design on the top was inspired by a gravestone in Scotland: I hope it will hold her finest pieces and bring her peace and joy when she reaches into it at the beginning and at the end of each day.  Velvet lined drawer with walnut dividers . . . Made of Leopardwood, walnut and Maple and African Blackwood. hand carved legs accent this piece As my professor said "she is one very lucky woman". Enj...

Welcome to my blog about my life as a woodworker. I make gorgeous furniture and other useful things out of wood. Its not a lofty job, but I love merging creativity, skill and furniture. Please share this post in some way to help me spread the word about my work. I also provide many helpful links and ideas about marketing your own work. I have been in business most of my life. I began making cabinets, then building and renovating homes and now I am happily designing and crafting furniture.  Being a furniture maker is a perfect fit for me and business is starting to flow after a long grueling start up.  Businesses change all the time. We adapt to our current situation in order to grow or maintain or reduce, depending on what is needed for the best profit margin or other gain. In today's market I am constantly promoting my work in order to find clients rather than compromise the integrity of my work. Showing online is one way that woodworkers are trying to sell their...

Recently I was reminded of one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s most famous lines "I have a dream" . "So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream" Can you hear it? "It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream, I have a dream" . I hear it in my head just the way he said it, don't you? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking into one of those old fashioned microphones with passion and conviction and  eloquence. He kept repeating that phrase " I have a dream ". What would he say today? I was almost 2 when he gave that speech in August of 1963. No, I don't remember hearing the speech live. But all my life I have heard it in movies and documentaries and radio. Do you remember how you felt hearing his words, listening to his speech? He dared to challenge a long held institution to free a group of oppressed people. Do you recall feeling like your own dreams were within reach? If only it were possible...

Buy now  seats 8 comfortably, 41" wide, 85 3/4" long 29" high. Made from re-purposed fir floor beams, Jatoba, American Cherry, Walnut and Quarter-sawn fir. A good friend recently told me that when she worked in an Art Museum she met a collector who said that he really wanted to collect art so he created one by NEVER GOING OUT TO EAT. Never. All that money he saved and spent on ART. Well, this table is perfect for someone like him. And I would think he would be very happy to use a part of his collection! This is not just any dining room table! This is a piece of art waiting to inspire you each day. I'm not sure how the idea began but I was starting to mill some fir beams that I had removed from my house thinking I would make a workbench. I assumed they would be similar to the 4 x 4's that we buy today with wide grain. As I began milling and inspecting each one I soon realized that I had enough fine wood to make an interesting table. Then somehow, perhaps...

check out my post titled "Documenting Our Work" to read more about this furniture Made from American Cherry this is a Dresser which incorporates a headboard and more. The clients who commissioned me to build this have a bed in the middle of their room with a four sided vaulted ceiling reaching its peak in the center. As you can see this is much more than any old headboard. It is also a dresser, two bedside tables, reading lights, bed cubby holes (at the top of the pillow area), and it is a wire chase for any electronics you may want to store in the cubbies. I might as well add that the headboard on top is a sculpture.  Stay tuned! Today was photo day so I have many photos to filter through and work on. I will doctor up the background on the pic here and remove the wheels from the dollies! :-) This measures about 8' 4 1/2" in length, aprox 28" deep and under 5' in total height. Commission me to build your next furniture!

Creativity is like riding a bike. Y ou might be a little rusty at first, you may even fear falling off, but then you feel the wind through your hair, you find your balance and wonder why you haven’t ridden in years! More and more people are embracing creativity in some way because they feel the need for connection, expression and the acknowledgement of who we are. The act of being creative requires us to take risks. Most of us learn by the time we are in middle school that we had better stay comfortable and safe and not take any more creative risks. Somehow, transitioning from stick figures to realism is a daunting task. Go figure! We Americans want successful results right away. Do you know some people spend their lives drawing the figure? Somehow, as our brains develop, we never make it back to the drawing table and we continue playing it safe. Making furniture is already a bunch of hard work, why make it even more difficult by changing the design? I could be mak...

It's like take out, you have to make the call and place your order if you are going to get your dinner! Jo Bradney  still life My last post really got me thinking about the process of creativity. I was explaining that I am waiting for the right design to ‘come to me’ for a box hinge and legs that I have been dinking around with for the past 6 years. I realized that I didn’t say that I actually have to place an order for the design. I set an intention and put the box off to the side while I am working on actual jobs. I don’t know what I will make for it. I try to clear my mind and let the creative department take over. Being a woodworker, I do my best to balance creativity with skilled manufacturing. I did start out designing with a drawing. However, in this case, a drawing just won’t suffice. The particular board that the main box is made from has so much personality that a drawing just isn’t going to cut it. It isn’t simply a question of the size of the ...