Almost every year since I can remember my family has attended the Kansas Mennonite Relief sale held at the Kansas state fairgrounds in Hutchinson, Kansas. The sale is a two day event that involves eating traditional Mennonite food, a huge quilt auction, various booths where crafts and other items can be purchased, and a general auction. All of this is a fundraiser for the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) and is used to support their programs all over the world. I've always enjoyed sitting in the general auction, especially when my dad was around, and watching the various items sell. They would sell everything you could imagine at this auction from tools, toys, crafts, furniture, automobiles, and everyone's favorite, the restored tractors. My grandpa had a few cousins that were very talented and made items for this auction. His cousin Orie Voth would make a clock every year and sometimes a step stool or something small. He also had a set of twin cousins, Marie and Martha Voth who did amazing wheat marquetry seen
Here. They would make one of these every year for the sale and they often sold for over a thousand dollars and sometimes double.
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| Warkentin Mill in Newton, KS by Marie and Martha Voth |
Ever since I began woodworking I've wanted to build nice furniture that other people would want to have and buy and I've especially wanted to build something for the MCC sale. With limited time I had so far focused on learning the skills of hand tool woodworking while making a few things for myself. In the fall of 2016 I decided that the time had come and I would make something to be sold at the MCC sale in the spring of 2017. I wanted it to be something small and not overly ambitious since this would be my first piece of "nice" furniture. I had seen some neat dovetailed step stools on the internet and decided that would be a perfect project for the sale.
I had wanted a step stool for our kitchen that the boys could use instead of pulling a chair in every time they needed something so I bought enough material to do two step stools. I built the one to keep first as a practice for the one to sell. I really wanted to show off the hand cut joinery of the pieces and bought some nice dark walnut for the sides of the stool and some light curly maple for the steps. Here are some photos of the process.
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| Sawing walnut to length |
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| Planing walnut for flatness |
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| Jointing the edge of a maple step |
I glued two walnut pieces together to get the full width needed for the sides of the stool. I then cut the shapes for the two steps into the walnut sides and tapered the front and back edges. After that was lots of dovetail practice. I cut all the pins in the walnut sides for both steps and then followed with the tails in the maple steps.
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| Cutting walnut sides to shape |
After gluing the steps, I added trim to the front of the steps and then a support across the back. I then planed and scraped the entire step stool to make the joints as seamless as possible. For durability I finished the stool with a few coats of semi-gloss polyurethane.
Then, I did this all over again, making the second step stool slightly smaller and also adding some extra dovetails. When going to auction, my only hope was that the step stool would sell for at least $100. Anything less than that would be a disappointment. To my delight there were a couple bidders it sold for $250 to some family friends we used to go to church with.
