I recently made a Christmas gift for my Sweetie...

Several years back, some friends gave my wife an old antique sewing machine table that had belonged to their grandmother. It sat in storage for quite a while; then last year we re-purposed all the sliding drawers from the unit into handy little desktop holder thingies and gave them to our friends' daughters, and my wife and daughter. But still, there sat the remaining iron frame with the now-dilapidated wood framework and non-working sewing machine. So, it was time to make something nice of it and gift it to my wife...

After removing the old sewing machine and stripping off all the remaining wood parts, I got out some pieces of white oak and made a new table top to mount on the iron frame.

Milled up three pieces of white oak to about 1-1/4" thick and glued them up...

After trimming the blank to final size, I cut underside bevels along all the edges. This would make the thick top have a less chunky appearance...

Then I filled knot holes with epoxy, scraped and sanded through grits to 220g, applied several coats of General Finishes High Performance clear water based topcoat (adding just a few drops of red mahogany stain to warm it up a bit), buffing between coats...

All done, and time for the gifting...

Build the top and bottom horizontal web frames:

Build the vertical web frames. Cut dados (to hold drawer runners & dividers); trim frames to size and square:

Using biscuit and glue joinery:

Use screws to join the vertical web frames onto the horizontals:

Install drawer dividers and drawer runners:

Slide the completed drawer frame into place inside the bench:

Time to start making some drawers!

Hannah @pleasantviewsoaps  has been using two long soap mold boxes for pouring her soaps. But she realized she would need some shorter molds that would fit in a refrigerator in order to cool down a new kind of soap she is producing during its initial cure process.

So, we dug out some 3/4 red oak and had at it! Four new half-length soap molds in a little over a day...

Next up on the Shaker workbench build: the drawer case. We acquired the rough 4/4 cherry lumber and milled out the parts into rough dimensions - all 60 of them...

Making a new batch of natural wood soap racks for my daughter over at Pleasant View Soaps...

Cutting the wood blanks out of poplar wood:

Routing the rounded grooves in the tops:

Using a dado blade on the table saw to mill the grooves on the bottoms:

Lots of detailed sanding:

Finishing with a blend of mineral oil and beeswax:

Turning and flipping the top to get it in position to finish it up (needed some additional muscle):

Scraping and sanding for smoothness:

Installing the mounting blocks, to which the top will be secured:

Building/Assembling/Mounting the vise (Twin Turbo vise by Andy Klein) and apron:

Top in position, vise installed and operating:

Done with the top!

Next phase: build and install the framework for the drawers...

I had to put a pause on the workbench and vise for a little while to clean up and rearrange the shop (and the shed, and the laundry room).  This gave me some more elbow room in the shop. You have to do some reorganizing and purging once in a while... :)

Well now, making the top for the Shaker workbench is turning out to be a whole 'nother project on its own!

Cutting white ash boards, 18 in all, to rough size and milling to final thickness/width...

Making some heavy duty clamping cauls out of SuperStrut, and some clamping stands out of plywood...

Laminating 3 "sub-slabs" of 6 boards each: glue, cauls, clamps...

Running the 3 sub-slabs through the jointer and planer to get them to almost final thickness...

Doing another glue-caul-clamp process, this time to join the 3 sub-slabs into one monster top piece. The cauls worked wonderfully, necessitating only a little glue scraping at the seams, and the top was flat and smooth. MANY thanks go to my lovely and gracious Glue-Up Helper Squad! :)

To be continued, after we recuperate and eat some more Wheaties... :)  :)

Assembling all the rest of the base pieces together, and setting it in the mobile base:

Thanks to Deb and Hannah for the continued help!

Next big milestone: building and installing the top!

Assembling the back with stretchers, mullion rails, and painted panels: