Ash & Oak stools and coloring wood with walnut husks

This is one of a pair of ash and white oak stools I did for the 2010 Monrovia fair. I had a bad feeling about the fair before hand and it proved to be so. It was a washout for me. So, I gave this stool to my brother for his birthday.
The top is a plate of ash from the same log I did the last set of stools from. I'll probably be able to get a few dozen stools out of it before I'm done. The legs are ripped from a roughsawn white oak 2x4 I salvaged. I only roughly smoothed and shaped them, leaving the major saw marks and signs of wear in place.
Ms Jaunty Beret, one of our gold wyandotte hens, came to supervise my photo session.

After Ms Jaunty Beret realized I had nothing to eat and left, her place was taken by Quaker Jack the mallard.
This is the same stool from a lower angle to show the legs a bit better. This stool has no stain, but several coats of spar urethane.

This stool is the one I thought would be interesting to rustic minded readers.

The stool is just like the one above, ash and oak, with a couple differances.
The legs are red oak instead of white. I cut them from an 8' 3x3 I found behind a dumpster in town. Probably from a shipping crate of some sort.

It's about an inch and a half taller than the stool at the top of the post, 18" surface height. This the most common height for dinning chairs.

The most interesting thing is the color though. I used no commercial stain on this stool. Instead I rubbed it directly with the green husks of black walnuts. The juice of the husks produce a powerful stain, and I've tried before to make a liquid stain from them, with limited success. This time I just twisted the husks off the nut and rubbed the juice into the wood by hand.

For the picture, I place the stool on top of a another section of ash from the same log, to show the difference in color between the unstained wood and the husk colored.

At first the stain colored the wood a yellow-green that wasn't so appealing. But I left the stool in the sun for a couple of days and it gradually changed into a very rich nut brown with gold high lights. I'm very pleased with the results.

I'm going to go collect enough walnuts for a big piece now. I'm thinking of a kitchen table. I'm still going to try and render or tincture the husks into a liquid base, but I have the feeling that I just won't get the deep color that hand rubbing with the husks has provided.

A somewhat gothic wine crate lamp table.

16" wide x 24" long x 34" tall. A lamp table is taller than an end table as it is meant to stand behind or beside a reading chair. It keeps the lamp higher than an end table to shed good reading light down on the book.
They also make good door side tables or entry way tables. You can put a basket or tray on an entry table to keep keys or serve as a catch all.
None of the three photos here quite have the correct color and tone of the actual table. The top and bottom are too light, and the middle is too dark. I used an old can of ebony stain that had solidified, and though I thinned it back to liquid, the change alters the texture and color of the stain.
I like it though. It's much darker than I usually go with, but I think it fits the shape of the trestle legs quite well.

The top is made from an old and scarred maple cutting board. It took a lot of hand scraping with a broad chisel to remove the top layer of surface wood. I didn't want to plane it as I didn't intend to remove all the years of knife scars from it.
I went ahead and routed the edge to dress it up a bit. Maple really works cleanly, the routing is very sharp and defined.
I usually use old pine, poplar or oak for tops and they're much less apt to take a clean edge without a few extra passes.
This is the only crate I had for Cassilero Del Diablo, a Cabernet from Chile. Its shallower than most of the other crates I've collected and gives the table a less top heavy profile. In these pics is looks a bit leg heavy to me, but it doesn't appear so in person. A matter of perspective I suppose.