so many possibilities

I've been wanting to take a woodworking class for a while now, mostly to alleviate this itch I have to design and produce my own furniture. Specifically, my own coffee table.

The clunky ikea table we have now is very functional, but is also an unattractive pressboard block. I see pictures of tables like this gorgeous piece above by Ali Sandifer and just lust after them. But this table is not for a grad student's budget! Still, I should be able to do better than ikea if I make it myself, right? I could design a table with an open area to slide in my magazines and a more enclosed spot to hide the bf's xbox controllers and our ugly remote controls! And after a bit of sketching and measuring out, I could go get some wood and get cracking!

So after a few minutes of day-dreaming along these lines, I start browsing my local community college listings for classes. I love learning new functional skills, and somehow this seems like both a fun and important skill to have. There are obvious pitfalls, of course. 1: I barely know a thing about woodworking, and 2: I want to be fantastic enough at it to be able to make a graceful table after only a few classes.

Should be no problem, though. My dad (and his dad before him) is a good woodworker and has extensive construction abilities, so I like to pretend his skills somehow transferred magically to me in childhood. Even though I have never used tools more sophisticated than hammers, drills, and sandpaper. When you've grown up seeing lumber go into the garage and finished pieces emerging, the building process starts to seem deceptively straightforward.

I may not get to this in the next few months, but there is definitely a furniture design/ woodworking class in my future. There is something amazingly serene about spending an afternoon with a slab of wood on two sawhorses on a sunshiney driveway, sanding planks down to a perfect silky smoothness. I could go for that kind of creative therapy right now. And what better redemption for all the sweat and effort of creation than the smell of sawdust, achy muscles, and the promise of a designed piece that fits my life exactly? I can't wait to try my hand at it, for sure!