I did my usual thing when making a common item and looked though images of different versions for inspiration or shameless copying. This four-legged design showed up a few times and I liked the simplicity and I suppose "modern" look. So then it was just a matter of choosing a wood (hmmm...Cherry), banging out a quick drawing and then getting to work.

Fortunately I had enough Cherry in the shop for this simple stand.

Then it was the standard cut-to-size, flatten and plane-to-thickness operations.

That's the four legs and a section for the two cross pieces ready for shaping.

The legs were marked using just pencil and ruler to outline the simple tapered shape and then cut on the band saw using an angle guide.

The saw-cut edges were smoothed using a spokeshave followed by sanding.

The cross-pieces would connect to the legs with a mortise and tenon joint. Here one of the legs is getting a mortise formed using the drill press.

The edges of the mortise slot were trimmed flat with a chisel after the drilling operation.

And then it was back to the band saw to cut tenons out of the ends of the cross-pieces.

The sawing operation of course formed rectangular tenons so they were trimmed to have round ends to fit into the round-ended mortises.

The cross-pieces also received their half-way-through cutouts where the two pieces would overlap.

Here's the entire plant stand kit ready for assembly.

I planned to have rounded corners on all the pieces but that was left as a post-assembly operation.

OK, back to the plant stand and time to start the assembly.

To minimize glue squeeze-out in the joints, I mostly glued the tenons rather than the flat mating faces.

That's the first half glued together and clamped.

Once the frame-half was together, I used the router with a roundover bit to radius all the corners.

Of course the corners and edges all needed to be cleaned up by sanding, so I proceeded to do that, finishing with 320 grit paper.

After both halves were rounded, they were glued together at the center joint.

That middle joint needed a bit of shaping where the two cross-pieces actually crossed and some sanding sticks and a file took care of that.

I wasn't too crazy about the square-edged top of the legs so I decided to round them off;

The last bit of woodworking was adding the date to the bottom of one of the legs.

A while ago I got an air quality monitor for use in the shop. It displays particle counts for small (0.5-2.5 micron) on the left and large (above 2.5 micron) on the right. These counts are per 0.01 cu ft so multiplying the displayed values by 100 will give particle counts per cubic foot.

These are actually pretty decent numbers for the shop (whose observed range is 250 to 3000 for the small particle range). Unfortunately even the lowest count I've seen only rates "Fair" and 3000 is well into "Very Poor". Cough.

I thought before starting the finishing I would run the air cleaner for a while and after an hour or so the counts dropped a fair amount (but didn't go any lower than this). I have my doubts that this will have any noticeable effect on the finish quality but it can't hurt.

Out came a can of Minwax Fast-Dry Polyurethane. The first coat I'll usually put on with a foam brush as seen here while the next two coats will use a cloth-coated foam brush which seems to give a smoother surface.

Let the drying begin!