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A photo essay on Arts & Crafts furniture legs:
| All projects in this leg photo essay are built with White Oak. When quarter-sawn, attractive rays can be revealed... but they only occur on two radial faces. The other two plainsawn faces have no rays. Many techniques have been used in furniture history to work around this reality of trees. The goal is always the same... to show the best looking grain on furniture. This plant stand, in the style of Charles Limbert, has solid oak one-pc legs. The tiger stripes are medullary rays through which the tree moved sap. |
| the style of Gustav Stickley. The rift-sawn legs of the little table have very straight grain, which is another approach to making attractive legs. There are no ugly V-patterns, known as cathedrals, on these one piece legs. |
| Viewing adjacent leg sides reveals the straight and similar grain. All four sides match, even though these are just one-piece legs. The tradeoff is fewer pretty rays. But certainly a decent compromise. |
| The tabouret legs shown up close. There are some rays showing... but fewer than might be seen on quarter-sawn lumber. |
| I designed this umbrella stand to rhyme with the Arts & Crafts style. This is the bottom view of the two-piece legs. The mitered corner serves to conceal the tricky corner joint where they meet. |
| This view of the partially assembled umbrella stand offers a glimpse of the mitered leg. It is challenging to build clean joints without unsightly gaps. No putty or filler was used. The pair of 'legs' on each face of the stand were taken from a single cleaved board to ensure a pleasing grain match. Actually the same applies to each pair of rails as well. The uppers were cut from the lower rails, so the grain matches. The wide slats were booksawn from a thicker board, also to match the grain. |
| One piece legs |
| Two piece legs |
| Page 1 of 3: one and two piece furniture legs |
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