Dewi's Stage
Props & Furniture

Furniture: Victorian Whatnot


	In The Heiress, set in the 1850's, shelves were needed in the corner of the room in a house to hold various knick-knacks, one of which would be a working prop. Now a Victorian Whatnot - a set of shelves and supports made to stand in a corner - would have been ideal, but in this case the included angle where the two walls met was nowhere near a right angle. The solution was to make a whatnot customized to the angle needed.
		The whole thing is fairly fragile until screwed to a wall. Such strength as it has comes from the one solid vertical strut at the back corner (1"x2" pine, of course). The fretwork at the top is made from scraps of 1/8" hardboard.
	The shelves are from pieces of left-over particle board, with routered front edges.
		In a real Victorian whatnot, the vertical struts between shelves would be decorated in a spiral fashion, also know as "barley-sugar", once the screw-cutting lathe had been invented. Since I do not have one, I made do with nominal 1" struts with router decoration and a collar half-way up, in the same style as the pads at top and bottom.