Hand-crafted table tells a very Vashon story

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, December 19, 2017

It’s been more than six years in the making, but two homegrown, handcrafted 15-foot tables made from single slabs of wood are on display during the holidays in the lobby of Vashon Center for the Arts.

This is very much a Vashon shaggy-dog story that involves island ingenuity and creativity. It all began when an enormous madrona tree came down on the Burton Peninsula.

President and Managing Director of Vashon Forest Stewards Dave Warren saw the giant felled tree as worthy of milling, so he called islander Al Bradley, who moved it to the Forest Steward’s logging yard behind Pacific Research Laboratories (see story on page 1).

Part-time islander Chris Fry then milled it into 15- by 5- feet wide slabs that were stacked to dry.

Five years later, this past fall, island artist Tom Northington crafted a couple of live-edge tables from the slabs, which now stand front and center in Vashon High School’s Eric Gill room in commemoration of the island architect and capital facilities director of the Vashon School District. Gill died of cancer in 2015.

Meanwhile, Warren showed the tables to part-time island resident Tadashi Shiga, CEO of Evergreen Certified LLC, who commissioned Northington to make a table out of another slab from the Burton tree for his Seattle office.

Now, after over 250 hours of sanding and inlaying pieces of wood into Shiga’s table and a second one commissioned by Warren, the finished 15-foot live-edge madrona tables are temporarily exhibited in VCA’s lobby.

Islanders are invited to stop by to see the tables that so many islanders helped create. Several planks remain, ready to be fashioned into more tables and to carry on this very Vashon shaggy-dog story.

Contact Northington at twnorthington@comcast.net or Warren at davidwarren@centurytel.net for more information.

— Juli Goetz Morser