Tree Spool Holder

Welcome to the inaugural post from West Mitten Crafts.
You might be asking what is West Mitten Crafts? Well it is a new business that my wife (Stacey) and I (Lee) are starting from home. We plan on selling products on etsy and local craft shows. Along the way however we are going to be creating some YouTube videos and blog posts with progress on different projects with woodworking, crochet, knitting and a few more.

To kick things off I would like to start with a project that I did for my wife's birthday. I had promised her a bookshelf in the shape of a tree (check it out here), but the craft room where it was supposed to go was not complete (still isn't). I still wanted to get her something to help her in her crafts and organization.

I ended up making a spool tree to hold her sewing thread. I started the project out of a 3/4 inch sheet of poplar plywood 4 foot x 4 foot. I hand drew a tree on the board and cut it out with a jig saw.

A few notes about using a jigsaw. I was getting a lot of tearing or chipout when using the jigsaw. I found out after cutting out the tree and reading the manual that there are settings on the jigsaw that let you change the way the blade moves through the wood. I was on the wrong setting when I cut the tree out but it still came out okay, just took a little extra sanding.

The plan was to use 1/4 inch dowel rods sticking straight out to hand the spools of thread. After talking to a fried about the project he suggested using a larger dowel rod going into the tree and a smaller dowel rod into the larger one making a little L shape or what looked like a pipe. The picture you see below has holes drilled for the dowels to go into. The holes were drilled using a forstner bit.

After drilling the holes we stained the tree. Before applying the stain to the actual tree my wife and I applied some to a scrap piece, and its a good thing we did. Originally we had purchased a Sedona red color stain and it did not look good on this type of wood. I had a little bit of the stain you see called Provincial and it looked good on the scrap piece so we just picked up a bigger can to do the entire tree.

The next step was to glue in the dowels. We turned some of the dowels so that the spools wouldn't all be going the same way. I think it makes it look more natural this way. You can see Stacey with a slight smirk of glee holding up her new tree.

Here is the final product after three coats of Minwax Polycrylic.

The tree blends in with the wood paneling a little too well, but I still think it came out well overall. When the tree goes to its real home in the craft room which will have drywall and some paint it should standout and be a real nice piece of functional art.

Update: I have added a new picture with the painted drywall background.