Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:13:11 +0000

Hi, there!
More and more, the artists who wield paint & brush are harkening back to yesteryear, eschewing wiggly canvas, and instead choosing rigid supports on which to express themselves.

Yielding to their demands, the Art Cellar began carrying wood panels, much to delight of our beret-wearing solvent-sniffers.

Handcrafted by burl-knuckled woodsmen at Wisconsin's Old Wood Studio, these lightweight, fine-sanded, birch-faced panels are about 1.5" inches deep, and come in all your favorite sizes and prices:
6 x 6"............. $4.20
8 x 8"............. $4.50
8 x 10"........... $4.75
10 x 10"......... $5.35
11 x 14"......... $6.25
12 x 12"......... $6.70
12 x 16"......... $7.75
15 x 30"......... $15.65
16 x 20"......... $11.25
20 x 20"......... $17.00
18 x 24"......... $14.65
20 x 30"......... $18.95
24 x 30"......... $21.95 (Note: prices and selection may change.)

This rigid surface means that your painting is far less likely to crack, which recommends it to encaustic and other thickly-applied media. Done on a panel, a painting is virtually ready to hang up and sell for thousands of dollars. It may even pay for all the paint you bought. "Designed to be looked at, not used" 2009-11-06
By Matt Post (Rochester, NY United States)
We've had this high chair for six months, and I've postponed writing this review because I really wanted to like this product. My wife and I were after a nice wooden high chair that would last as long as the wooden ones that our own parents still have, instead of purchasing yet another hunk of colored plastic that doesn't look as nice and would have to be thrown out after a number of years. This chair has a number of positive things going for it: the wood is of good quality and the pieces are well cut, it assembles easily, and it looks very nice, modern, and durable.



However, I have rated it one star, because I have a hard time believing that the people who designed this chair actually have children, or used it for their own children. Almost all of my complaints have to do with the tray mechanism. Its worst feature is that the tray is built from two separate pieces of wood: the horizontal piece slides into a groove in the frame piece. The tray comes assembled, but the fact that it is built from two pieces means that (a) food will find its way into the groove and (b) you will never, ever be able to remove it. This is in stark contrast to other wooden high chairs, which construct the tray by carving a recession or small dip out of a single piece of wood, which allows the tray to be totally (and easily) cleaned after each meal.



In addition to this defect, the tray does not seem to have been sealed very well, as the wood on ours is already starting to warp from moisture. We are pretty good about cleaning the tray soon after each meal, but still this has already started happening after only six months.



Finally, the tray attaches insecurely to the chair itself. I've already had to tighten the screws that secure the tray brackets to the high chair, and imagine that I am going to have to do this fairly regularly. The latch mechanism works by lining up a peg with one of two holes drilled into the tray arm, which permits you only two depths that the tray can be secured at. The latch also does not lock very well, and I find that it is a pain to release the latch and remove the tray for cleaning at the sink (which you can't do anyway, since water would get into the groove and rot the wood).



Moving on from the tray, the belts that secure your child in the chair will not do that job. The side belts clip into a middle belt that comes up between your child's leg, but because the side belts start from opposite sides of the seat (instead of in the back near the middle), a child of average intelligence can very easily scoot her way back and up to get out of the harness. We have found that we have to extend the belts all the way and cross them in back in order to keep our daughter in the chair.



In summary, this high chair would be very excellent for tea parties with some stuffed animals, but if you don't want the messy business of feeding your child to be unnecessarily complicated, I'd take the money you'd spend here (which is quite a lot) and buy a different wooden chair.

Images ProductBuy Keekaroo High Chair With insert and Tray Now