Two Famous Styles of Live Edge Slabs

Two Famous Styles of Live Edge Slabs

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Live edge refers to the technique woodworkers and furniture makers use when they incorporate the natural features of a slab of wood into a piece. The style creates aesthetic beauty by celebrating rather than hiding the natural features of wood. If you've seen a chair or counter with the bark of a tree incorporated or the inborn curve of a trunk preserved, you've seen the live edge style before. Many woodworkers use live edge slabs in distinct styles—with metal, resins, or other materials—to create furniture or household items.

Free Form


One way to use live edges is in large, free pieces sealed and set as a surface area. Woodworkers can use bigger pieces of wood slabs for counters. In the live edge style, you can see the grain, knots, and imperfections in the wood, sometimes in many parts of the work or on a single side. The slab can be dipped in resin or can be covered with a flat piece of glass to keep liquid or food out of the wood itself.

Besides counters, this type of live edge wood can be used to create wood slab tables. Tables, like counters, use a large flat piece of wood and often preserve the natural features of the materials on the edge or a single side, in order to make them more functional.

Worked with Other Materials


Artists or woodworkers can work reclaimed or newly-harvested woods into pieces with their natural features showing through. In this style, the wood is incorporated with metal or other materials to produce a complex type of furniture.

Live edge slabs don't have to be flat. With curved pieces, artists can make the base and backs of chairs. Then, legs can be made by attaching hammered metal, glass, or industrial materials. These pieces of furniture can be highly functional and comfortable, but end up looking like a real work of art instead of a mass-produced piece of furnishing.

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