Serving Boards

Most pieces of Furniture start out from slices of tree, whole boards sawn from the trunk, as long as the trunk itself or as long as is manageable, and often the full width. From this the parts for Furniture pieces are selected, paying attention to grain orientation for strength and beauty of the final piece, and trying to maximise the use of the wood and minimise the waste material left. Inevitably usable pieces of wood are left over, not the right size for work in hand, but too good to be discarded as waste. The larger of these with most potential can be repurposed in other projects but the rest get added to the ever growing mountain of offcuts 'far too good to burn' but not really big enough to be used in most work. 

I have taken some of these offcuts, often shaped and sized purely by how they were cut off, with the worst of the splits or defects removed, and simply planed them flat and smooth with a simple chamfer and hole, occasionally a handle, and finished with a homemade blend of food-safe waxes and oils.