Doing a bit of a throw back with this post, back to our engagement party over 3 years ago now! And there is a little bit of back story to how this DIY came to be. For a very long time Taylor had wanted to have a donut tower instead of a wedding cake but Mitch said that he would like to be a bit more traditional on the big day so we decided to compromise and Taylor got her donuts for the engagement party.
As we were going with a romantic/rustic theme we thought it would look amazing to have a wooden donut stand. We did a bit of research and these are super expensive to buy so we decided to make one ourselves. Luckily for us Taylor’s dad was able to bring home and cut up some old power poles from his work and this would be the foundation for our stand.
Firstly, we had to figure out how large we wanted the tiers to be and how we wanted to reduce them by as they got smaller towards the top of the tower. The poles were naturally hexagon shaped, and although this isn’t what we first thought we would want it turned out really nice. We had three tiers total, the second being 1 and a half inches smaller than the bottom and the top being 1 inch smaller than the middle.
Again, luckily for us we had connections with people who had high quality saws and we were able to trim these very easily. We then sanded everything back until it was as smooth as we could. It wasn’t perfect, but we would have been sanding for days to get it 100%, which we were not willing to do.
Plus, it would mostly be covered by the donuts anyway, so close enough was good enough for us!
Then we needed to stack the tiers. We decided to use dowel to separate our layers and bought this in a circumference that would be the same size as a drill bit and thick enough to hold up the weight of our layers. Next question, how tall do we want this thing to be? then some match to figure out how long our dowel spacers would need to be. We calculated the height of the whole tower and then took away the width of the three layers. We then divided this number by two so that we know how long the dowels needed to be between the layers and added a little buffer as we would be inserting some of the dowel into each layer above and below it.
The wood looked great at this stage but to make it a bit more special we varnished the wood with a clear varnish and just followed the instructions on the tin.
The trickiest part was figuring out how to align the holes in the top of the base tier with the bottom of the second tier and so on.
We used a very basic tactic of wetting some paper and sandwiching the two tiers together so that a mark was left where we would drill. And although they weren’t perfectly aligned when we put the whole thing together we have learnt a lot and love how it turned out! We hope you guys do too!
Love TM xx
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