Phoenix Feather Woodworking

Phoenix Feather Woodworking Hand Crafted with Wonder and Imagination.

Phoenix Feather Woodworking is a small, woman-owned woodworking studio in Brandon, FL, handcrafting cutting boards, barn quilts, pet pieces & more — backed by 20+ years of design experience.

09/03/2026

See the process I use for almost every piece like this. I sketch the design in Illustrator or Figma, cut a 1x4 pine board down, resaw it into 3/8in strips, plane both sides, and then cut every single piece on a jig so they all come out identical.

After that it is dye (or paint), sand, glue everything to a 1/4in MDF backer, and add a mitered border with a 1/4in groove cut into it so the border covers any imperfections around the outer edge.

Swipe through to see each step! (I promise I am getting video camera & tripod soon so you can WATCH the process!) :-)

What does your process look like? What would you do different to make this piece?

See the process I use for almost every piece like this.I sketch the design in Illustrator or Figma, cut a 1x4 pine board...
09/03/2026

See the process I use for almost every piece like this.

I sketch the design in Illustrator or Figma, cut a 1x4 pine board down, resaw it into 3/8in strips, plane both sides, and then cut every single piece on a jig so they all come out identical.

After that it is dye (or paint), sand, glue everything to a 1/4in MDF backer, and add a mitered border with a 1/4in groove cut into it so the border covers any imperfections around the outer edge.

Swipe through to see each step! (I promise I am getting video camera & tripod soon so you can WATCH the process!) :-)

What does your process look like? What would you do different to make this piece?

Sneak Peek! I am so excited about my next piece now that I have the color palette ironed out. Instead of staining or pai...
09/01/2026

Sneak Peek! I am so excited about my next piece now that I have the color palette ironed out. Instead of staining or painting over the grain, I am using a paint wash technique for the best of both worlds. Make sure to follow to see the final piece soon!

08/30/2026

I have been posting a lot of fails lately, so here is proof that I do sometimes catch a mistake before it is too late.

This is me dry fitting a new piece, which means putting the whole thing together with no glue first, just to make sure every piece actually lands where it is supposed to. There are about 100 individual pieces in this one, so yes, it is tedious, and yes, that is exactly the point. As I was laying it all out I noticed that one piece was noticeably shorter than the ones next to it, and it happened to be sitting right in the middle of the layout. If I had glued that one down where it was, everything around it would have shifted and the whole piece would have been off. Then I found a second short one on the other side.

The frustrating part is that I cut these with a jig, so in theory they should all come out identical, and I still have no idea what happened with those two. But I had extras, both replacements dropped right in with no problems. Hopefully the next thing I post about it is not a fail.

What is the shortcut you have taken that you swore you would never take again?

No stain, no dye, no paint. That purple is just what the wood looks like.It is called purpleheart, and it comes out of t...
08/27/2026

No stain, no dye, no paint. That purple is just what the wood looks like.

It is called purpleheart, and it comes out of the tree that color. These four got a thin walnut stripe down the middle. I liked the idea of one quiet line breaking up all that color, and walnut is warm enough to sit next to purple without the two of them fighting. They are only coasters, so there was no real reason to fuss over lining up four narrow strips this carefully, and I fussed over it anyway, and I would absolutely do it again.

What I did not plan on is that I now straighten them every single time I walk past the table so all the stripes run the same direction. It has become a whole thing.

Why did my OCD allow me to take the photo this way? Does this trigger anyone else? Should I take the photo into photoshop and straighten them?

There is no undo button on a router, which is a thing I think about every time I start a project like this one.This is a...
08/25/2026

There is no undo button on a router, which is a thing I think about every time I start a project like this one.

This is a 16 inch round of cherry with twelve walnut hour marks inlaid into the face. It started as a plain blank and a lot of pencil. I found the center, drew the circles with a compass, and stepped off the twelve positions by hand, because every one of those marks is a slot I have to cut into the front of the piece and there is no putting the wood back once it is gone.

The slots got cut with a trim router running against a straightedge clamped across the blank, one at a time, rotating the blank between cuts. Then I glued a strip of walnut into every slot and let them dry sticking straight up out of the face, which made the whole thing look like a cherry hedgehog for a day. After that came trimming them close, sanding them flush, and sanding again until you cannot feel the seam between the walnut and the cherry with your fingertips.

I left the numbers off completely. The grain in this piece of cherry does more than any set of numerals would, and cherry has the nice habit of deepening in color for years after it leaves the shop, so it will not look quite like this photo forever. It is only twelve small pieces of walnut, but they are the whole design, and getting them evenly spaced was most of the work.

Here is my question for you: numbers on a wall clock, or just the marks? I am genuinely split on it, and if enough of you say numbers I will build the next one that way.

08/23/2026

New woodworker achievement unlocked!

I finally made a zero clearance insert for my table saw. The idea is simple. The plate that sits around the blade on a factory saw has a wide open slot, which means small offcuts can drop down inside and the wood tears out along the bottom of your cut because nothing is supporting it. A zero clearance insert replaces that with a plate where the slot is exactly the width of your blade and nothing else. Cleaner cuts, no dropped pieces.

The standard way to make one is genuinely elegant. You clamp a blank piece over the throat, drop the blade all the way down below the table, turn the saw on, and slowly raise the blade up through the blank so it cuts its own perfect slot. I got about as far as "drop the blade all the way down" before I found out mine does not go low enough to clear the blank.

So I did it the long way instead. I cut an eighth inch groove with the router, then took a chisel and a hammer to the rest of it until it fit. By the time I was done I had used the table saw, the router, the chisels, the hammer, the pencil and the combination square, all to make one small plate that lives inside a tool I already owned.

I am counting it. Six years in and there are still plenty of these small firsts left.

For anyone else with a shop, what is the shop-made jig or upgrade you use the most?

What color would you make the border of this wood art mosaic?I am having a hard time deciding on which one would be best...
08/21/2026

What color would you make the border of this wood art mosaic?

I am having a hard time deciding on which one would be best for this one.

Help me decide! Leave your answer in the comments below.
1. Dark gray (same as what is in piece)
2. Walnut
3. Natural wood (same as what is in piece)
4. Slate Blue (same as what is in piece)

Over 120 pieces of pine went into this one, and it is only about 10 inches square.Every single piece gets cut and fitted...
08/20/2026

Over 120 pieces of pine went into this one, and it is only about 10 inches square.

Every single piece gets cut and fitted before any color happens, and then the real decision starts. I used four different wood stains on this one, running from the palest natural pine down to a deep chocolate brown, plus a dark stain on the frame. I could have painted it and been done in half the time, but paint would have given me flat blocks of color with nothing underneath. Stain soaks in instead of sitting on top, so the grain of every little wedge still comes through. That is what gives it the rustic look rather than a crisp graphic one, and it means no two pieces in the star are truly identical even where the color matches.

It is sealed with three coats of polyurethane, so it is protected and it is not going anywhere.

I will admit that the moment the last piece went in and the pattern closed up at the center, I sat there on the shop floor and just looked at it for a while. Six years in and that part has not worn off yet.

This one is available now on my website, and I will drop the link in the first comment. If it found a home with you, where would it hang, the entryway or over the kitchen sink?

There is a version of this piece where I took the easy road and painted it.Paint is faster, the color is more consistent...
08/18/2026

There is a version of this piece where I took the easy road and painted it.

Paint is faster, the color is more consistent, and honestly nobody would have complained. But paint sits on top of wood and hides it. You end up with a shape in a color, and the fact that it is wood at all becomes a technicality. So I went with stain and wood dye instead, which soaks in rather than sitting on top, and the result is that you can still see the grain running through every one of the almost 100 pine pieces in this one. The blue is blue and it is still obviously wood. Same with the tan, same with the brown. Three coats of poly over the top of all of it.

It took longer. Stain does not behave the way paint does, and every board takes it a little differently depending on how thirsty it is, so getting the values to sit right across the whole pattern was a slower process than I would like to admit. But that variation is the reason the piece has any depth to it at all.

The whole thing is only about 10 inches square, framed in dark stained wood. I made it small on purpose. Most wall art assumes you have a big empty wall waiting for it, and most of us do not. We have a narrow hallway, a spot beside a door, a shelf, a gallery wall with one gap in it that has been sitting empty for two years. This is for those. I also put hanging hardware on all four sides of the frame, so it can hang four different ways and you can rotate it whenever the mood strikes. I have already done that twice and I only finished it recently.

It is up in the shop now at $75, and is on Etsy as well. And if you want one in different colors, that is very much a thing I can do.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this new piece! Should I make variations in other colors?

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Brandon, FL
33511

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