LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Woodworking is a skill that doesn't come easily and requires years of practice and effort, but one UA Little Rock student is proving to be pretty good at it, turning trees into furniture for other students to use.
It all started with trees cut down on the UA Little Rock campus.
"I thought it would be a really good idea just kind of put these trees back into the campus in some sort of functional way," UA Little Rock design student Kimberly Arcega said.
Kimberly Arcega is a senior working to get her BFA in Applied Design with a focus on woodworking. About a year ago, she said yes to a new opportunity that came her way.
It involved making furniture for a newly renovated student lab in the Department of Construction Management and Civil and Construction Engineering.
"Kim is a design student who is not even in our college," Department of Construction Management and Civil and Construction Engineering Chairman Hank Bray said. "We were able to reach across campus and collaborate."
Bray said the lab is still a work in progress, but thanks to Arcega, students will spend the years to come doing schoolwork on the oak tables.
"I'm particularly excited about the kind of coffeehouse feel of this room, the tables' waist height so that they can collaborate meaningfully," Bray said.
It's something Arcega had never done before.
"It was a huge project, and the fact that I pulled it off was kind of a surprise," Arcega said. "I'm very proud of the work that went into these. I learned so so much."
She estimates each table weighs about 300-400 pounds and said she kept the natural feel throughout the design.
"The structural stability of them is kind of compromised when you keep knots like this," Arcega said. "But by filling them with black epoxy and stabilizing those knots, it creates a very beautiful, useable piece of wood that still looks like the tree it came off of."
She spent more than 200 hours bringing her vision to life, and now students get to enjoy it.
"I'm really happy to see that these will be used in a way that I intended them to be used," Arcega said. "They fit into the vision that Hank had when he proposed the ideas to me."
Arcega is on the next project and plans to graduate in May.
After graduation, she hopes to teach others the same skills she's learned.