Christmas Presents #2 – Cat phone holder

Following on from my previous post here, this is the second personalised gift I decided to make for people for Christmas out of wood. For Mum I wanted to make something cat themed and came across an image of a cat-shaped phone holder, which seemed perfect! To start I once again made a rough sketch plan and then made a template out of mdf so I could check the size and that it would be stable enough to take the weight of a phone.

My mum is not someone who spends hours watching videos on YouTube or generally doing spending excessive amounts of time on her phone, but she regularly puts her phone down on the kitchen counter while doing other things, so having somewhere specific to put it might be useful! So the next step after creating the template was to transfer that to a piece of pine and then cut that out. As I have quite a lot of scrap pine I sorted through several pieces until i found one that was the right size and shape so that I avoided any major knots or marks in the wood.

I then used my jigsaw to roughly cut out the shape and did the fine tuning with my coping saw and an awful lot of sanding! I took my time to get the shape right as I wanted it to look good and to not have any rough edges.

The final step was to wipe the surface with a damp cloth to raise the grain and then re-sand it all over to get a nice smooth surface!

I am very happy with the finished result, and Mum seems to love it too! The grain stands out really nicely and I think it makes it look a bit like a tabby cat with horizontal stripes. And I definitely seem to be getting better at sawing round corners now! 🔨