Children's Dresser in curly maple

• This is a dresser I made for my daughter. I scaled down the proportions so it is a nice fit for toddler clothes. She can also open and close the drawers herself.

I built it with traditional frame and panel joinery. The panel was cut on the tablesaw and then cleaned up with a smoothing plane. I routed the bottom moulding and top cove on the router table.

Maple is pretty bad with wood movement so I gave the panel a lot of room to move. However, I noticed that in the summers it is really stretching the limit so if I was to do it again I would leave more room. My Lie-Nielson 4 1/2 with a York pitch had no trouble smoothing the highly figured maple. The batch of maple that I got is probably the best figured maple I have seen. I was able to use one wide piece for the panels which I think improves the look overall.

Getting the drawers to slide smoothly was definitely the most challenging aspect of the project. They required quite a bit of planing to get right. I dowelled the drawer sides to the faces. I wanted to do dovetails but I was running out of time and Zoe's clothes needed a home.

Children's Furniture: Toddler chairs

I've recently been focused on building children's furniture because, well, I have children and they need stuff. I decided to build a couple toddler chairs to go with a chalkboard table that I built. Once it was completed, it was obvious that the first chair was a bit off in dimension and proportion. The back was too low, the seat was too high, and the depth was too long. This was pretty evident after it was completed but chairs are hard to figure out from scratch. When building for toddlers there isn't a standard rubric for dimension. Short of building a full scale mockup it is pretty trial and error.

The first and second chairs

The second chair I think turned out better dimension-wise. The proportions are better and my daughter sits in it more naturally. As far as construction goes, I used 5/4 cherry for the legs and rails with 1/2 inch for the seat and  3/8 inch for the backrest. Not having all the time in the world, I did not use mortise and tenon joinery. Rather I used high quality hardwood screws with flush dowel plugs. I would never make an adult chair this way but for kids I am confident it is sufficient. There just isn't that much weight put on them and with the beefy 5/4 stock there really isn't any flex even when I sit on it and lean back.

The proportions of the chair on the right seem much better

They are fun to build and go together fairly quickly. Since the parts are so small I mostly use a flat-bottomed spokeshave and block plane to clean everything up. To hollow out the seat, I hog it out with an aggressive spokeshave going cross grain and then smooth it with a random orbit sander. The last word in children's furniture is that you must remain calm when they inevitably chew and marker all over it. At least you know the finish is safe.

Hollowing the seat