I’ve been pretty heads down for the past little bit working on a big ol’ king sized bed frame. The customers are civil engineers living in North Portland, and wanted it to look something like the St John’s Bridge. For any folks reading this that don’t live in Portland, here’s a photo of the bridge taken from the deck of the bridge.

It’s really a very pretty bridge.

Now, I couldn’t help but to introduce a little curve here, a curve there, but we worked through a number of ideas and settled on a design for the headboard that features the three gothic arches that are so prominent at the top of the bridge’s support towers.

Considering that I had just enough elm that had been salvaged from the Portland Park blocks 20 years ago sitting in my shop as leftovers from another project to build the frame of this bed, and considering that the St John’s Bridge is a Portland landmark, it was a easy decision to use that elm as the basis for all of the other wood choices in the bed. I settled on using some figured maple for panels to represent the gothic arches, and some pretty basic walnut as panels for the remaining spaces. A bunch of milling, cutting, and shaping ensued, and this is what came out the other end.

A little more shaping …

The footboard is much more simple.

I had to do some rearranging of the shop in order to get it all put together.

And, here’s a close up of the birds on one of the arches. (I had some significant tearout when I planed it, so I figured that inlaying a bird would be the perfect way to fix it. And, now it’s art.)