After a Month of French Polishing, our bookshelf is in place!

Finishing is always the longest, most intensive, and hardest part of building things. I, of course, compound the difficulty by insisting on making my own aniline dyes and shellac.... I do water based aniline dyes because I love working with curly maple, and stains obscure the grain and kill the 3D shift in the depth of the grain as you walk by. I do shellac because it’s harder and harder to get de-waxed shellac anymore, and in making my own I can adjust the cut to exactly what I need. I also LOVE a French Polished finish! For this bookshelf I was going to just use the shellac as a sealer and bonding agent between the Danish Oil finish and the top coat, but as I built it I decided to go French Polish the whole way. This has taken well over a month (also due to overwork and exhaustion from remote teaching, which is soooo much harder than teaching in person!), but I’ve finally built it up to a place I’m happy with. Today I moved it up to our living room, but am going to give it a week before I put anything on it to let the shellac fully harden. I built this special for our cd books, because they are an odd size for any of our other bookshelves. Since we’ve been married (9 years!) my wife and I had never sat down and combined our music libraries, and weeded out all the doubles. When the Quarantine hit last year, we finally did it, but the books have been sitting on the floor in front of one of our other bookshelves ever since. I drove to a lumberman in N NY for these gorgeous curly maple raw milled boards, and planed it down and built the bookshelf special to my requirements. I also made an extra shelf for the bottom alcove that I specially designed for my living room workbench, which is currently piled with eBay items I’m selling). I’m very pleased that we can get another organizational task finally completed, and that it is such a beautiful way to do it.