It’s harder than it looks
Last friday, I was dragged out of work to go SCRAPping with the best and the bears. My first stop at SCRAP is always the corner where they keep the stacks of tile, because there is almost always something or another that can be used for a project. Last friday was no exception; there was a little plastic bin full of fused glass tile samples, and 4 sample folders of tiny glass tiles in many different colors and degrees of irridescence, all of which ended up being purchased and relocated to Chateau Chaos.
A bunch of the tiles were 3x5 samples, half frosted, half not. If you put them into a square frame with a nice wooden base and top, you'd have a nice table lamp. So we stopped at The Joinery on the way home to pick up another box of hardwood scraps (this time I got two boxes, just because you can never have too much walnut, cherry, and esoteric South American hardwoods that I'd like to pretend are from a sustainable harvest, but in reality are probably part of Brazil's clearcutting in the Amazon basin) and, when we got home, I sawed up some of the wood into lamp parts. On Sunday evening, I finally got around to gluing up some of the lamp parts; I carefully pulled out the heavy stone slab that I use as a level surface, glued and clamped the frame, and left it to dry overnight.
This afternoon, I pulled apart the clamps, only to discover that despite laying the pieces out of the level surface, and despire carefully using a rubber mallet to make sure all the joints lay flat, the stupid parts had glued together warped. Which, considering that the parts in question were the base of a lamp, wasn't exactly the desired effect. So out came the rubber mallet again, but to break the glue joints apart (hard work to do, but I finally broke everything apart without the wood splintering), so I could sand off excess glue, put on new glue, then clamp the whole thing up again, but this time pressed and clamped between two slabs of hardwood.
I can't wait to see what won't work with it this time.