Pusheen the Cat

Age: ageless
Body Type: loaf
Likes: short, romantic walks on the beach
piles of clean, warm laundry
sunbathing in my zen garden

How I made Pusheen's Zen Garden

No affiliate links, just a list of the exact items I bought: Pink Sand Plastic Palm Trees Wooden Zen Garden Tools Blue Wood Stain Water Based, Semi-Gloss Polyurethane 2" Foam Brush 11" x 14" x 0.19" White Foam Core Board
Not so exact:
I already had the crochet hook, yarn, and sewing pins. Here's what I'd buy if I needed to. Size E/3.5mm Crochet Hook Cheap, Medium-weight, Acrylic Yarn Sewing Pins
This is probably the wood I bought. I looked for a Birch or Pine wood that was unwarped and didn't have knots. 0.75" x 7.25" x 48" Pine Board
I didn't make any drawings because I knew what I wanted. Obviously I regretted this later.
I started by cutting the Pine board in half length-wise so that I had two 0.75" x 3.6" x 48" boards.
One of those boards was then cut into four pieces: (2x) 7" & (2x) 8" long boards.
Next I arranged the boards into a rectangle box, drew the wave pattern to be cut, and numbered the bottom of the boards to indicate where the wave corners matched up.
Used a jigsaw to roughly cut the shape of the waves.
Then used various sizes of sanding drums to smooth out any sharp edges, and create organic wave shapes.
Sorry for the horribly overexposed picture, I was more excited about my zen progress than I was about taking the time to set up proper lighting.
After stain and polyurethane has been applied.
Took one coat of stain, which I sanded to make some original Pine color show through, and 3 coats of polyurethane.
This is the first time I regretted not making a drawing.
To make a seat for the foam board bottom I routed a 0.25" x 0.25" corner into the inner-bottom length of each wave board. A drawing would have made me realize that I should leave 0.25” of wood at the end of every board so the assembled box wouldn’t show the routed edge. Skip the next picture to see the glaring notch of wood missing from the outside
Action shot!
I used a joint angle guide to create pocket screws, then screwed the box together after tripple checking that the corners matched up.
This is the second time I regretted not making a drawing. Had I thought the process through I would have used finishing nails and wood glue to assemble the box BEFORE applying stain and polyurethane. I did not list the screws and pocked hole plugs in my BOM because I will not do it this way again, and do not recommend it.
I had to sand down the protruding bits of hole plugs and apply more stain. I was not pleased with the look, but knew the sand would cover most of it.
Finally time to hotglue the palm trees into place! Each tall tree shared a molded base with a short tree, so I cut some apart to get the spacing and density I wanted.
I forgot to take pictures of the hammock I crocheted, but here is the YouTube video I watched to learn how to crochet a triangle.
I used sewing pins to stake the corners of the hammock to the palm trees, and used flush-cutters to snip off the points that stuck out the back.
At long last I settled Pusheen into his hammock where he will spend the rest of his days in peace, and inspiring peace