I got The Why and How of Woodworking for Christmas and quickly contracted kumiko fever. I hit a brief lull between projects and realized that I hadn't made anything for my own house since 2017, which is just unacceptable. I decided to make a kumiko lamp to replace a sad little Walmart lamp my wife and I have had ever since we got married. I started by making the jigs:
Two jigs with a simple screwed-in stop in the right position. Snug enough on the sides to hold the kumiko piece in place.
The kumiko is primarily ash, but the thinner pieces are white oak. It just happened that way with the scrap I had. I think it looks nice.
Things were going great until I got a little TOO in the groove and a piece of white oak snagged on my chisel, and the chisel jerked out of place. Had to get four stitches in my left index finger. Not actually that bad of a cut, but it was weirdly shaped and I did not want it getting infected. I've cut my fingers before, and the wounds never seem to close up right without help. So at that point I took a week off.
After it healed up, I got back on it!
I decided I wanted a walnut frame. I had some walnut leftovers from my last project, so I
The walnut is just simple mortise-and-tenon joinery. Super simple with a dado blade and hollow-chisel mortiser. The rails have a very slight rabbet that receives the kumiko panel. Not pictured is how I added a border to the outside of the kumiko so there is a nice border of light-colored ash around the edges. The top is not going to stay like that - I'll have to make something to hold it in place.
Next up is to sand the kumiko panels until they're pretty. I'm also looking forward to getting to apply the rice paper to the inside of the panels. I'm going to use a thin double-sided carpet tape between the rice paper and the kumiko.
I think it'll look pretty sharp!
I still want to trim the legs a bit shorter, and I still want to put some sort of curve on the legs - something kind of like what Cremona did on his son's twin-size log bed's legs, if you remember that thing.
Other than that, I have got a SWEET idea for the light installation. I bought some remote-controlled RGB LED strips that I'm going to adhere to a cylinder to basically create my own intense, huge, super-bright light LED light bulb. The rice paper should diffuse it enough that it will look incredible. This thing is going to be really cool.