Chess board in Blender

Of late I am spending more and more time practicing modelling using Blender (http://www.blender.org) and observing the excellent 3-d modelling posted on various forums and especially DeviantArt (http://www.deviantart.com). Below is one such excercise I asked myself to do. Make a chess board.
In this, I used the proportional editing feature of Blender extensively as this was some thing I learnt recently. More improvements are needed though. If any one wants the original .blend file or .obj format, please drop me a mail. I will send you and you can practice as well as improve the design.