My wife is developing a flair for water color painting. I am excited to see her digging into the work and developing new skills. We are learning that this process often requires drying time so that she can come back and add to her work later. This has created a bit of problem: Where do you put Water Color paintings to dry?
She is a problem solver and has developed a technique for clipping the paintings to the blinds. This keeps them up and out of the way so she can continue working on other projects, but it has also presented a few new issues. Now, if the windows are open, the paintings will sometimes fly off the blinds. The volume of work begins to block the light that comes through the windows. Also, it looks a little messy seeing half finished works of art hanging all over the place!
I started researching what kinds of tools are available for her new trade and witnessed lots of wire frame drying racks. Everyone of them looked simple enough and many were quite affordable. The look they offered, however, was not worthy of my wife’s work space. I seek to keep her space calm, peaceful, inviting, and beautiful so her inspiration is unhindered by her environment. It made sense, then to build her something that would work well in her space.
I looked around my shop and found that I had plenty of scrap walnut and cherry laying around. I built a frame from cherry scraps and rails for the drying racks from walnut. I ripped my cherry scraps into 3 inch widths and cut two pieces at 30 inches to use as uprights, two pieces at 6 inches to use as feet, and two pieces at 4 inches to use as supports and attach the uprights and one piece cut to fit between the uprights at the base. I cut my walnut into 1/2×1/2 stock and the cut the stock into 12 inch segments.
I set up my dado stack for 1/2 width and cut a notch into my uprights every inch beginning at 12 inches from the bottom. I created a half lap joint to join the base of the uprights to the “feet”, then used my spacers and supports at the top (butt joints, glued and brads) to finish the frame. I glued the walnut drying racks in each 1/2 notch. I treated it with some mineral oil after the glue set.
The end result is a drying rack that fits her décor, is easy to move (she can lift it with a finger) and holds plenty of her work. This bought her space, organization, and piece of mind as I earned a couple of brownie points for myself.
