What Are Shaker Pegs?

Shaker pegs are usually made of wood and are basically fancy wooden dowels. One end of course is designed to be put into some other piece while the end with the elegant design stays in view on the piece being displayed. Most often, shaker pegs are used in coat racks or boards mounted on the wall to hold hats and coats.

Shaker pegs believe it or not are rather inexpensive, however people use them for many wooden projects to offset the design or to add to the overall effects of the piece.

Wood workers who design furniture often use shaker pegs as part of their design on dressers, or night stands as well as lamp stands. The shaker pegs are usually aligned in some way to make a pattern on the base of the stand or dresser.

You won’t be able to find shaker pegs just anywhere, maybe at a home improvement store or hardware store but most often a lumber store would sell them or at least have some in stock.

Shaker pegs can be made of almost any type of wood but the most common is birch, cherry, maple, and walnut. Basically because these are softer versions of wood and designs are easily put into the shaker pegs which are usually a small piece of wood to work with in the first place.

An actual wooden shaker peg is usually anywhere from three to six inches long and no more, some are thicker than others while there are some wooden shaker pegs as thin as pencils that we write with. These are very difficult to design and therefore this is somewhat the reason why they cost a bit more than average. But if you are looking to add a unique look in wood or a wooden piece these will definitely do the job for you.

Sometimes if you are a wood working hobbyist and design different things, and you use these wood shaker pegs then you know that you can either varnish, stain, or in fact paint them, but it is wise to only do this after the entire project is completed due to the fact that wooden shaker pegs are so small. Wood shaker pegs which actually work in the same sense as wooden dowels are usually placed into another piece of wood using wood glue of some kind. There is no other way to fasten shaker pegs to another piece of wood because they are in fact so small and hard to work with.

In some situations shaker pegs are used sparingly in a project when in other situations the shaker pegs can have as many as fifty on one wooden piece.

There are several web sites that show shaker pegs and even the different designs, some of the web sites also offer them for purchase. On one website I saw a dining room lamp stand that had shaker pegs all around the base of the table, there were a total of fifty in all it was absolutely beautiful, and expensive as well. It had been varnished and everything, this is just one example of how the shaker pegs offset a plain piece of wooden furniture to turn it into something unique and original at the same time.