Christmas Presents 1 - Cutting Boards

I made these cutting boards as Christmas gifts for my Mom and Mother-in-law. My wife has been asking me to make her a smaller "cheese board" for a while now, so I got her to draw me up a full size template of what she had in mind, and I took it from there. I really liked her design, so I made a second one to give to my Mom. My wife's board is made of maple, walnut, and padauk, while my Mom's has maple, walnut, and purple heart. The overall dimensions of these are around 13×7.75×1.4 inches.

I made a larger conventional cutting board for my Mother-in-law. This one is made of maple, walnut, and cherry, and has overall dimensions of around 14×11.25×1.1 inches.

These took quite a bit of work. The harder exotic woods were too much for my crappy planer, so I did all of the machining with my tablesaw, then glued them up with cauls and sanded a ton to even up the faces. after that I sketched on the shape, roughed it out with my bandsaw, then did a lot of sanding with a drum on my oscillating drill press to bring it to final shape. All the edges were rounded over with the router. I finished each board with about 4 coats of plain mineral oil, then topcoated with 2 coats of Howards Butcher Block Conditioner for the added benefits of wax in the top layers.