In my previous post, I wrote about my canopy bed.  Now that I had a bed that looked like something out of a fairy-tale I desperately needed a better bedside table.  I had just been using an old metal filing cabinet.  It was functional, but didn’t look all that great.  So for my next project, I decided to make a table.  And what goes well with a fairy-tale bed?  A mushroom, of course!  Thus the mushroom table was born.  While designing the table, I struggled through all sorts of very impractical ideas that would have made a 3D surface in the shape of a mushroom (fiberglass, papier-mâché, lots of thin bent wood strips, etc.).  None of these seemed very workable, and furthermore, I didn’t really like the looks of these designs.  I wanted something a bit more artistic.  As I worked at the design I decided that I didn’t really want to make an exact mushroom shape – I just wanted to give a suggestion of a mushroom.  And then it occurred to me that I could use flat sheets of wood to build up the correct envelope (outline) of a mushroom in three dimensions.  The resulting table is shown in the pictures (note that some of the pictures show the table in my living room before I moved it into the bedroom).

The larger sheets of wood are a fairly nice grade of 3/4″ birch plywood.  The edges are covered with birch edge banding.  I stained the mushroom head pieces with a brownish-red wood stain and used artist’s acrylics as a thin wash.  The mushroom stalk got a similar treatment, though with white, green, and bronze iridescent acrylics.  I then sanded the parts, sanding more in what could be high wear areas to give it a bit of a rustic feel.  I cut out circles from decorative paper and découpaged them onto the mushroom’s top surfaces (a fairy tale mushroom needs polka dots!).  Then I finished it off with a couple coats of polyurethane varnish.