I am in the process of designing a centerpiece for our dining room table to help decorate what is otherwise a long and unremarkable woodgrain slab. Not that I don’t appreciate the natural beauty of a well designed and expertly built solid-wood table, but it needs a little bling. And yes, I designed and built the table which I guess makes me a bit of a braggart. I also have relatives and friends who live in Canada so I now feel compelled to say; “Sorry”.

This is a woodworking website and an active wood shop and I like to feature projects that are complex and intricate sometimes because those make for good YouTube videos, but complexity is not always needed for a good design.

My first thought was to find a decorative idea that was really difficult and challenging as a means to make a great video. The project could showcase lots of tiny cut pieces and complex glue and assembly procedures. The featured piece could be a twisted maze of different colored hardwoods and focus all your attention to it as you walked by and noticed it resting in the middle of the dining table. Maybe it was time for me to remember who I am, where I came from and what things are most important about wood design.

I am at my core, a product of a working class family from Detroit who grew up near Gratiot Avenue and Detroit City Airport. Wooden items in our house were well built, simple in design and served a useful purpose. I still think our dining table needs a little something attractive in the center to help decorate the room, but I also think the piece can be simple and functional too.

One of the places we visited on our recent trip to Vermont, Maine and upstate New York was the Corning Glass Works Museum. While wandering through the site and then later the gift shop, my wife gravitated to a number of colorful art glass vases but I was looking for some inspiration to fill that void on the dining table. Not really focused on anything tall or serving the purpose of a vase, I didn’t want to take the easy path and choose the common solution of sticking a bunch of flowers in the center of the table. There’s a flaw in that decoration when family comes over visit. You have to remove the flowers so people can actually see each other across the table without bobbing and weaving their heads to see the person speaking. Yeah. No.

During my stroll through the shop I stumbled upon a featured glass artist who used colorful but simple combinations of glass to form a series of flatter platters and trays. The Verre Visage Studio was headed by Christine Freeburn and some of her glass platter designs were pretty amazing. One of her larger pieces featured a red perimeter and some welded white and black accents and the light bulb went off in my head. Not that I can duplicate her naturally flowing and exact tray design with wood, but I could use the color theme and substitute wood varieties to make a similar sized tray. I’ll place her studio link at the bottom of this blog.

Now that I had the idea for a longer and wider serving platter or tray, I fell back into that trap of wanting to make the thing as complex as I possibly could. Maybe I could cut a series of small colored wood pieces to form a mosaic in the center of the platter, or cut a complex end grain pattern to make the base look like a cutting board. The failure in my thought process was of course driven by the desire to produce good videos, and I forgot a couple of critical things; who I am and what the room actually needs.

Part of the issue for me and this platter idea is that I didn’t want the platter or whatever I chose to place on the table to take the focus off the beauty of the dining table itself. I worked pretty hard to make that thing and it didn’t make sense to me to cover it up or say something like; “Forget that table and look at me instead”. As if vases or platters could talk. “Sorry”.

In this case and for this particular solution, I think simpler is better. Of course the platter will be decorated a little, merging a couple different colored hardwoods to define and decorate the piece, but it won’t be jumping up and down on the table screaming, “Hey look at me!” And of course, you won’t need to push the thing out of the way in order to talk to your sister.

It’s also important that the color scheme fits the room. Since there are two art pieces in the room that feature the colors white red and black, my platter will include those same colors. As soon as I get the final video published, you’ll be able to see how all 3 pieces, left to right, fit together.

So aside from the constant push and motivation to make really intricate and complex videos, as if that is somehow required to show my worth as a woodworker, I think simple is better in this case. I did however cave into a bit of a gimmick during the recording of this build, specifically channeling some fan appreciation for Wes Anderson movies. You’ll have to wait for the goofiness to conclude, but I’m looking forward to finishing this project.

Glass Artist Link: http://www.verrevisage.com/204934.html