Upcycle Progress: Organic Knifeblock

Progress has been relatively slow on my knife block. Since I’m sourcing the wood from someone else, I have to work with someone else’s timeline. Ideally, I would have gotten the knife block made this upcoming weekend, however some other events came up and it will need to be made the following weekend. That being said, I did sketch out some of my rough ideas. It’s definitely nothing much, but if anything it was good to see how my design might look, at least in a rough way.

The more I started sketching and throwing something rough together in SolidWorks, the more I started thinking if it would be interesting to not have exact dimensions for my knife block. In so many of our classes, we need to have specific dimensions (i.e. length, fillet radius, etc.). Besides the width and length of the knives I want in the knife block, I’m not really governed by anything dimension-wise. Since I’ll be using woodworking tools like planers and sanders, I thought that it might be interesting to try and freehand some of the organic shapes. Giving myself the freedom to be able to experiment during the woodworking process might make the entire project feel more organic, which will hopefully translate to the finished product.

This is definitely a shorter post than usual (not hitting the 500 word count, that’s for sure), but then again progress isn’t linear, and I think noticing myself wanting to artificially constrain something is important, especially in design. Working against that and giving myself the freedom to not care what the dimensions end up being might be freeing in a sense. We’ll find out!