Going big...

My friend Julie from Prince Edward Island commented on the last blogpost here, after I had written about the large table and set of chairs that was used as a horse shelter. She mentioned a huge dresser in High Point, North Carolina, so (of course!) I had to check it out.

There are actually two huge dressers there. I love the socks sticking out of the front of this one! 

This bad-boy is over 80 feet tall!

You can read about them here. 

High Point used to be the "Home Furnishings Capital of the World," though I'm not sure it is still considered that today. Many of the furniture factories have closed, and manufacturing has been outsourced to other countries with cheaper labor. 

There's a terrific book about that - Factory Man, discussing one man's journey to China, to discover just how furniture can be imported into this country so inexpensively. Here's a link - it's sitting on my nightstand right now.

In fact, the subject of this book, John Bassett III, will be lecturing here in town next week - I can't wait to attend!

So Julie's mention of the dresser in High Point started me thinking about large scale work.  Not all of them are furniture, but they're pretty great.  Just a quick Google search brought up some amazing images. 

Not sure what's up with the nuts, but I'd put one of these sculptures in my yard any day! 

I've always wanted to find the time to drive across the country, checking out silly tourist traps along the way. 

Here is one of my favorites pieces, in front of The Longaberger Company in Newark, Ohio, maker of some of the coolest handcrafted wooden baskets out there. 

Their baskets are insanely awesome - in fact, Stella even owns one. She was given a huge picnic basket (not as big as the one in the photo) by a friend and it serves as her toy box. It's huge!

Speaking of Ohio,I used to live near this silly tourist trap - the world's largest Cuckoo Clock.

It was literally on the way to my lumberyard in Amish country, in the back of a restaurant in the middle of nowhere. I'd often stop and get a piece of pie, and pay the 50¢ they wanted for admission to see it. You haven't lived until you've seen that five minutes of ridiculousness - a three-foot-tall couple on tracks dancing the polka to Bavarian music played by a five-piece robot oompa band. 

Think of the animated characters at Disneyland, only way older, with way less technology. 

Back to Julie - she's a great woodworker and does some fabulous posts about projects she's building. Check out her before-and-after picture of this dresser, after she turned it into a bathroom vanity.  Here's a link to Julie's blog.

Way cool.