Gothic Stool: Part I

This project reminds me a bit of the meditation bench I built because of the splayed legs and through mortises. But this stool has a stretcher and tusk tenons whereas the bench did not.











I drew a pattern in Illustrator based on an image I found in a book, then I located some thick cherry in my lumber stash, printed out the patterns full size, and made a plywood template for the curvy legs.






I was all set to start cutting the legs because the decorative elements of any project are always my favorite, when I realized that it would be much easier to layout the joinery if the boards were square.

Whew. Disaster averted.

The benefit to working from full size patterns is you can take measurements right from the printout. And for those of us who are baffled by simple geometry, it makes it easy to determine angles.

I drew a pencil line down the center of both leg boards and seat. This helped align the pieces when laying out the joinery.

It's a pretty straight forward build. The one thing I did differently than the meditation bench was to cut the leg tenons first rather than the mortises just to see if it was more efficient and/or produced better joints.

And the result of my in-depth experiment? I didn't notice a bit of difference.



Next up: cutting the stretcher and tusk tenons.

Those corners on the front of the legs
will be removed when I cut the
scrolly pattern. And the tenons
will be sawn flush with the seat.