Today's video covers a fun little project I recently wrapped up. A couple of good friends of mine were getting married and they wanted to do something a little different for their guestbook. They asked me to make them a liveedge wood slab for the task.

Around here we get bigleaf maple trees. They're not as hard as some other varieties, but I find the grain to be far more interesting than the clear, hardmaple you see in mainstream furniture and floors. Honestly I see big, fancy furnituremaking YouTubers buying expensive slabs of premium hardwood that I don't like half as much as any average maple tree on my property. I'm no expert; I couldn't tell you whether this is spalted, quilted, or what. But check out the colors and patterns I get in this project, even before finish. Wild.

So I chainsawed off a short chunk of a log I had laying around, and freehand cut it into two small slabs.

I made two mainly so that if I screwed one up I'd be covered. A big part of this project is going to be drying the pieces, and of course I've got a deadline, so if I have a bad split or a crack and no backup piece, I might not have enough time to dry another.

Anyway, see the video to follow through the process. It was fun and they both came out great.