Number 21

When I first visited this apartment I'm living in now, there was a huge 3 X 4 foot picture frame leaning against the living room wall, with a picture of an elephant, with a large, square hole cut out of the elephant's head. The picture looked as though it was made to fit the frame, but it wasn't really in the frame, just kind of leaning there ... and then, besides that, there was that big hole in the elephant's head. I wanted to ask, and in fact, did finally ask, "Why don't you throw that stupid picture away? Or at least put it in another room, so everybody won't be asking, 'Why is there a big hole in the picture?'"

Yep, that's a real parrot under the picture of the wounded elephant.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago when I moved in here, the picture was missing from the living room, (which made the living room look much less puzzling). Then I saw the picture-less frame crookedly leaning in the kitchen corner, next to the refrigerator. 

"There's some wood you can make a stool out of," my son said.

Well, since most of the wood I spent the summer collecting is still in that old trailer in my sister's neighbor's yard 20 miles out in the country, not readily accessible to me, I figured that my son was right. 

I took the frame out from the corner and looked more closely at it. It was made out of a fairly soft pine that had been run through a planer/shaper. There were actually 8 pieces of wood, two stapled together lengthwise on each side of the frame. The smaller lengths were covered with a kind of cloth tape, and the whole frame was painted dark brown. 

I knocked the frame apart, removed the staples, and decided to remove the cloth. When I did, I found that the wood underneath had been painted a light blue-green color before the tape had been applied. 

And when I did some sanding on the larger lengths, I found that they too had been painted the same blue-green color. Finally, everything, tape and wood, was all painted brown together, after the frame was assembled. There was a stamp on the unpainted back of the frame, "HECHO EN MEXICO". I'm guessing by the frame's construction that it was hechoed in a fairly small wood-shop/factory sometime during the '70's or '80's, by some darned good craftsmen -- but their work was undone by me, during September 2012.

I cut some pieces to length for legs and a seat, did some hatchet-work to split some of the larger pieces for the bracing, and I made a stool, modified Mexican style, here in Minnesota.

This stool is for sale for $65. If interested, please contact me through the comments section of this blog, or by email at lewagner2002@yahoo.com. For general information on these stools, more pictures, and a list of which stools are still available, please see older posts, and the Introduction.