Birds - The Brandegee Blog

Ramblings on Crafting Useable Art (and other things that I find interesting)

Birds
Posted on May 8, 2013

For years I’ve used saplings cut from birch thickets on our country place in Madley Hollow, PA for the backs of beds and benches.  Incidentally, despite concerned citizens often asking, “Don’t they break?” in over 10 years of use, not one ever has.  The closest we’ve come to a crack was during a Baltimore Craft Show about 8 years back.  The bench I was showing seemed to attract a flood of showgoers to test them, not by sitting and leaning back, but by grabbing an end stick and wiggling it back and forth as if it was a sports car gear shift they were test driving.  Even there, no damage.

It did worry me briefly, though, so I made another bench with carved stylized birds perched on the end sticks.  Later, the same kind of owl and cardinal lit on the head posts of a thicket bed that’s now in a friend’s beautiful bedroom whose windows look into trees on three sides.  The birds and the friend find it a comfortable context.

The bed is flanked by 2 bedside tables made from log cabin log sections, as are the bed legs.  The table posts are log cabin roof joists.

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