A mini wood and 'leather' bench.

 

Having made an armchair for my mini shed, I thought it needed a bench and table to go with it. So back to practising my wood skills.

I found some scraps of wood, in my growing scrap box and thought they would do the trick.

I had no real plan, no sketch, no idea what to do really. I cut the long bits of wood the size that I thought the bench should be, then I had another piece that I cut in half for the back legs and found two chunky bits that might work for the front legs.  I would adapt as I went.

 

I started with the bench seat and the back piece. I found some faux leather in one of my fabric stash boxes and I had some wadding left over from the mini armchair. All I needed was a staple gun – luckily I have one  😊

So I basically wrapped the faux leather around the wood with the wadding and stapled it in place.

Then it came to tidying up the ends.  I tried to fold the fabric over like I was wrapping a gift, but it was too thick, so I trimmed a bit off to make it less bulky.  Grabbed my trusted wood glue and glued it into place clamping it until it was set.

About an hour later I found out that wood glue will not stick faux leather!

So, a staple it would need to be.  This is where I was wishing I had cut a bit more fabric so I had more at the ends to play with. It was a tricky manoeuvre, included a few swear words and a lot of removed and reinserted staples.  But I got there in the end.   The staples are ugly though, I think I have a metallic marker somewhere that I could colour them in with to help disguise them a bit.

The next part was to stick my wooden legs and the back bits together to give the seat part something to rest on.  I did this and painted all the bare wood a lovely metallic brown.

So now it looks like I have a set of stilts and some seats.  Time to put it all together.

Having found out the hard way that wood glue does not work on this fabric, I dug out my hot glue gun and used that to glue the bench seat to the legs.  It was only to hold it all in place until I could get some screws in.

The next thing I had to do -  and this again was something I had learnt from things going wrong earlier in the project – was to drill a small pilot hole to guide the screws in, otherwise my wood would split  (expert now talking here folks!!)

So, drill I did, then screws, and it all worked out rather nicely.

And there we have a bench.  On reflection I wish I had used a nicer wood for the back struts as this is a bit rough…but then it’s a bench, I suppose its ok being a bit rough.

Time spent on this was around two hours.