This box is similar to box 33. They have the same dimensions, the bottoms were constructed in the same way, and both boxes have lids that sit inside a rabbet. But for all that similarity, they really are quite different. I made them both as an exercise to see if I could make two boxes with their own souls even though they had several important similarities. If I'm being honest, I'll admit that it was as I was designing this box that I realized a similar one would work nicely with box 32, so I began designing this box and box 33 in parallel. It was fun to make two boxes at the same time, using the same milling procedures, the same machinery setups, etc. and end up with two distinct boxes. This version of the box sprung from my dissatisfaction with box 6, which is the one box I've made so far during this adventure that I don't even remotely like. Box 6 is a second take on a box I made several years ago (that's it in the photo just over there, on the right). This time I went back to the original woods, cherry and white pine. It's a very good combination. This pine is some seriously old stuff that grew wickedly slow. I have friend who likes old timber frames (OK, it's John Tetreault from Fine Woodworking). He's using a bunch of old frame parts to make a wood shed and art studio on his property. He cut some pine timbers (about 8 in. by 8 in.) short and gave me the offcuts. It has super tight grain and a beautiful, lustrous color. The white pine that you can buy at the lumber yard now is a sad, pale semblance to the good old stuff. To match the tight grain of the white pine top, I used some cherry edge grain that also had very tight grain lines. Although the woods are the same, I changed the dimensions dramatically. The original is 2 in. tall, 5 in. wide and 8 in. long. I wanted this one to be small and more rectangular. It's about 1 1/2 in. tall, 2 in. wide and 6 in. long. The divider is 2 in. from one end. I know I've harped about the importance of proportions, so I'll go easy this week, but good proportions are so terribly important. Get them wrong and the box is simply bad. The original version of the box had cocobolo pulls. I didn't want to repeat that, so I went with painted pulls. I wanted them to be green, and I got lucky that I had some divider material left over from box 31. I just ripped it to width, cut it to length and then painted the ends. Perfect. I like the green with the cherry and pine. Another slight change from the original involves the fabric on the inside. Back then I glued fabric to some thin foam. This time I glued it to the bottom before I installed the bottom in the box. I really like the clean look of the fabric in this box. (I also used a different blue fabric. This one has a softer look.) Please humor me as I let fly with a few random thoughts.
I made this box to fit inside the rectangular and horizontal box in the set of wall-hung display boxes that I posted last week (box 32). The interior dimensions of that display box determined the dimensions of this box. And I knew it was going to be a simple box with a top sitting in a rabbet, and my standard bottom (plywood covered in shopsawn veneer and glued into a rabbet). But that's all I knew. There were important questions left to answer: What to do with the top? And what about the interior? And I had no idea what kind of pull I should use. But before I could answer those questions, I needed to figure out the box body first. I had the perfect piece of wood for it. This past summer when I was working at the Lie-NIelsen open house up in Maine, I began rummaging through the exotic woods for sale at the bench of Travis Knapp, who runs the eBay store RareWoodsUS. I found a 12 in. long blank about 1 3/4 in. square. I didn't know what species it was, but the edge grain was amazing: beautiful, tight, straight grain. And the color was fantastic, too. Travis said it was kingwood. I bought it, went back to my bench, then planed that edge grain clean. I feel in love. I'd been sitting on that piece, waiting for the right box to come along. This was the box. I knew that the wood's color would go great with the brown of the sake set. And the straight lines would compliment the vertical grain Douglas fir of the display boxes. I've never used an exotic wood for the body of a box—I prefer to save it for pulls and other small accents—but I'll have to try it again soon. If I can just find another piece of kingwood with grain like this! Knowing that this box would sit inside one of the display boxes helped me figure out what to do with the top: Paint it green. I used Lexington green milk paint, knowing that a darker green would stand out against the light green I used for the backs of the display boxes. And the dark Lexington green would compliment the rich brown of the kingwood. But the pull is really part of the top, and I had no idea what to do. So, I made and finished the box, painted the lid, and then set the lid in the display box as it hung on a small piece of drywall (temporarily, for photography). Mike was looking with me and suggested drilling a hole through the top and painting the inside edge created. "Paint it white," he said, "because the inside of the sake set pieces is also white." Good idea, I thought. He then said, "Make it a little round scoop instead of a hole." I took that idea and ran with it. The hole is shallow and has a flat bottom. I painted it with snow white milk paint. I then made a pull from ebony. The shape took a while. I fit the "tenon" part to the hole and then started shaping, putting the pull in place and taking a look, then going back to work on the shape. I like the final shape. It's low, so it doesn't overshadow the box, and the curve is very subtle. I shaped it all with a chisel and a rasp. And I really like the graphics of the rectangular green top with a white circle in the middle that's bisected by the thin rectangular ebony pull. For the interior, I put into play a suggestion made to me by another Fine Woodworking colleague, John Tetreault (he's a great designer and furniture maker, too.) We were discussing a group of 40 boxes (not part of this 52 box business) that I am making and he suggested that instead of painting the interior face of the bottoms, I should just glue some fabric to them. I liked the idea and decided to try it out here. I set the box over several different pieces (various colors, patterns, etc.) and settled on a piece that has brown flowers on it. It looks great. And glueing it to the bottom results in a much cleaner look than when I glue it to a thin foam pad. I'm fortunate to work with such great designers. I doubt I executed either Mike's or John's suggestion as they would have, but that's the way it should be. Well, then here are some random thoughts.
I suppose I should address the elephant on the wall first. Some might contest that this week I've not made a box. To this objection I say, "tis but a silly word, box. It means nothing to me." Perhaps that's not sufficient. Here's what I really think on the matter. I set the rules for this challenge and I decide what counts as a box. That too sounds a bit pissy, but so it goes. This is a wall mounted box designed to hold, keep safe, and display a sake set that belonged to my maternal grandparents. I can remember it in their house for as long as I can remember going to their house. My grandfather died first, about three years ago, and then my grandmother died little more than a year later. I went to their house after her funeral and was allowed to take this as a memento. I always liked it. I still do. If you look closely, you can see that a few of the cups were broken through the years and glued back together. I like that. The set meant something to my grandmother—enough that she kept gluing cups together—and so it means all the more to me. Well, that's the story of the sake set, or at least as much as I'd like tell in a public forum. I began thinking of how to display the carafe (I have no idea what the proper word is) and five small cups, and went through a lot of ideas for the overall design before I settled on using a small box for each piece. I was drawn to individual boxes because it would allow me arrange them in a nice geometric pattern (I do love me some geometric patterns) and to present each piece as something significant in itself. It then took several pages in the sketchbook to find the arrangement that I liked best. It's the one you see here. This left me with a bit of a problem: Why the hell do I need that other long box at the bottom? I don't know but it balances the pattern well, so I stuck with it. I originally planned to put a drawer inside it. But the proportions aren't right for a drawer (the box isn't deep enough for one thing). Then, in a moment of opportunistic genius, I realized that I could put a box in there! Two birds, meet one stone. At the risk of spoiling the surprise even more, this smaller box that goes inside the box at the bottom will be box 32. My thought next turned to how to make the boxes and the finer details. I wanted simplicity. The boxes are not what's on display here. A simple mitered box would fade into the background, but provide an elegant frame around each piece. The back of the box, I knew, needed to be painted a light color to provide some luminescence inside the box, and so that the sake set pieces would stand out against the back. Green can go nicely with brown, so I set about mixing up a custom green milk paint. This one is mixed from marigold yellow, Federal blue, and buttercream. The wood species fell into place after that. Douglas fir looks great with green and brown. Vertical grain Douglas fir looks awesome on miter boxes. The grain on the fir I used here is so tight and fine. It's the perfect amount of subtle for the task at hand. If you're curious, the unit of measure for subtlety is snurtles and this fir comes in at exactly eight snurtles. (Also, the fir came from a piece of roughsawn 8/4 vertical grain fir that I bought from a former FWW editor. I actually bought two pieces from him. Always buy good lumber when you come across it. Eventually, you'll find a use for it, even if it's after your wife leaves you because the entire garage is filled to the ceiling with glorious lumber, and the spare bedroom holds all the shorts.) I don't know if there's anything else to say. I suspect I'll have more next week when I reveal the little box that fits inside the bigger box at the bottom of this arrangement. Until then, feast (or starve, depending upon your opinion of my eccentrities) yourselves on a few random thoughts.
This is a simple box. It's just a small piece of veneer, some quiet wood for the sides, and a bit of milk paint as an accent. But it's stunningly beautiful. I think this is because of the balance struck between them. It certainly helps that the proportions are spot on—good bones are always beautiful. (It's less than 2 in. tall, 4 in. wide and 8 in. long.) And the box is an excellent example of using woods (and colors) that compliment rather than contrast with one another. Sometimes, a plan comes together. And like Hannibal, I love it when that happens. Let's start with the burl veneer I used on the top. I have no idea what species of wood it is. I was given three flitches of this veneer by a friend. The color is fantastic. So, too, is the figure. But what really makes this veneer work on this box is that the individual "burls" are small. It's super intense, but it's also well-proportioned for a small box. Big, loose burl wouldn't have looked right. It would have been out of scale to the rest of the box and that would have disrupted the box's harmony. That might sound silly—or even overly precious—but when you design a box or piece of furniture, you must give thought to every detail. I chose riftsawn madrone for the sides. I could have used cherry, but cherry has too much red and pink in it. I could have gone with walnut, but walnut is too dark for this veneer. Madrone is a finely grained wood with a lovely earthy brown sapwood. The grain on the piece I used was straight and tight. It's quiet—the perfect compliment to the muscular burl on top. There can be only one dominant wood in any one piece. The others should serve to bolster it's strength. (By the way, this piece of madrone was small, an offcut from a wall cabinet I made years ago. It's been hanging out in the shop, waiting for the right box to come along. It finally did. It's wonderful how little pieces of wood, long forgotten, pop up from the depths of memory at just the right moment. And this piece did. I remembered everything about it: dimensions, color, and grain. Perhaps I grow too attached to the lumber I own.) The green milk paint was easy to pick. The madrone is close enough in color and the fineness of its grain to apple that I knew that this green (which I used on box 25) would work well as an accent. Deciding to paint just the edges of the top (and bottom) was easy, too. I've done that before and it works well to separate the box sides from the top. Here it emphasizes the shape and figure of the top. Figuring out what to do on the inside of the box was harder. At first, I was going to paint the bottom and the dividers (and have more dividers), but that seemed too busy for such an understated box. I eventually worked my way to a bottom made from plywood and shopsawn veneer (riftsawn madrone), and just two dividers painted green. By the way, in the past I would have joined the dividers to the sides with a bird's mouth joint, but here I went with a simple dado. I gambled that painted dividers would look better with a squared end in a shallow dado. I think the gamble paid off. The joint emphasizes the distinct difference between the sides and dividers. In this case, that's a good thing. Here's something that struck me after I had completed the box. It was easy to design and even easier to build. That sounds tremendously arrogant, I'm sure, but let me explain why I say it. The design part was easy, because I was pulling together several design details that I knew worked: the top that's a bit proud of the sides (and has painted edges), a top that slides over the bottom, tightly figured veneered set against riftsawn lumber, dividers used to create a cool geometric pattern. I've used all of the design details in this box before. I just put them together in a fresh way. This excites me, because it means that maybe, just maybe, I'm getting to the point where my design aesthetic has a well-define grammar and vocabulary that can be relied upon to produce beautiful work. The danger is that I'll be lulled into a aesthetic slumber and get lazy with my design, rehashing the same details over and over. I think I can avoid that, at least for now. The making was easy because, hell, I've done it all before. There are no new techniques here. I made the box quickly. I didn't have to figure anything out. I could just work. In fact, it took me longer to finish it (because of the paint). Thoughts of a random nature:
I was tempted to post nothing but photographs of this box. I think these photos say more than enough about the box, but I figure at least a few will want to know what the hell I was thinking when I designed it. So, I'll do some writing, too. This is one of the first boxes I thought of after deciding to attempt 52 boxes in 52 weeks. Honestly, I don't recall where the idea came from. I think something like it has been bouncing about my brain for several years. I do know that it was boxes like this one that inspired me to undertake the challenge. All of the boxes I've made so far have been nice, but some of them really didn't push me aesthetically. I fell back into my comfort zone. This box is definitely not one of those. What appeals to me about this box is how strong a graphical statement it makes. I love that the blue circles dominate the box. The riftsawn cherry I used for the sides is really just a background color. That's what I wanted. This box is about color and geometry. (But note how the cherry's grain rises and falls with the larger circles. This symmetry between the grain and pattern of the circles helps the grain disappear. Again, design is always in the details.) This also is why the top is made from some book matched and riftsawn cherry. Keep the grain quiet. Don't distract from the sides. I thought about adding a few circles to the top, but I'm glad I didn't. That would have been too much. This box took a long time to figure out and make because it is technically challenging. The blue circles you see are actually about 1/16 in. deep. At first, I was going to drill through a thin, shop sawn veneer, paint the underlying substrate and then glue the veneer to the substrate. I thought and thought about how to do that and still get a good four corner match. All the solutions I came up with were too fussy. I then moved to the idea of making a template and routing the circles into the sides. That's what I did, but I need to thank Mike Pekovich for helping me figure out exactly how to do it (Mike and I have some great mind melds every now and then when we bat ideas back and forth, developing them—sublating [google Hegel and aufheben] them, really—as we go. These always seem to benefit me. I doubt I've ever helped Mike. He's a technical genius.) After cutting the sides to length, I laid them out in order (front, side, back, side) between two fences and two stops at the ends. A long template fit over the top of the sides. I then routed the circles with my DeWalt 611 with the plunge base. I used a 1/2 in. diameter "dado clean out" bit from Whiteside. (It's the same bit I use with hinge mortise jigs.) This arrangement allowed me to wrap circles around the corners. I don't know if any of that makes sense, but I took some pictures and I'll post them to my Instagram account (kenney.matt). Here's another important part of the design that also involves technique. Some of the circles bridge the bottom and top. I cut the top free at the bandsaw and then sanded the top and bottom on a piece of sandpaper stuck to my tablesaw to get rid of the machine marks. The cutting and sanding removes material and part of the circles. If the top sat directly on the bottom, you'd see a disruption in the circles' circumference. To overcome this, I used the box liner to raise the top and create a gap equal to the material removed. (Remember when I did this with box 12? I was testing out the technique so that when I made this box, I'd have it figured out. I've been working on Box 30 for a long time.) I need to thank Mike for planting the seed for this in my mind. I come to him with crazy ideas and the beginnings of how to get it done and he helps me get to a solid technique for doing it. I don't know what else to say. The box is the same size as boxes 28 and 29. The top and bottom are glued into rabbets. They're plywood—painted on the inside face and covered with shopsawn veneer on the outside. The liner is cherry, too, but painted with light cream milk paint from Old Fashioned Milk Paint. The blue for the circles is my old friend, Federal Blue. Looks like random thoughts are back on the menu, boys!
Here's another small turning. It's 2 1/2 in. tall and about the same at it's largest diameter. I used a piece of riftsawn ash, turning the vessel like a bowl so that the grain would wrap around the outside in nice, clean lines. I love the sweep of the grain. I painted the inside with a custom milk paint mixed from snow white and pumpkin milk paints. It's mostly white with a hint of the pumpkin to create the nice pastel color.
I've just about finished my next box. It's been near completion for a while now, but I haven't had a chance to finish it because my mom died after a long battle with a brain tumor. (I've been back home in Florida twice in the last month.) I'll have it up next week. And I have some great boxes planned for the next several. This looks like a hollow vessel, and I guess it really is. But it was turned with the blank oriented like a bowl, not like a spindle. So, I'm calling it a bowl. The ash I used is from the same stack as the small vessel, and the first bowl. (Maybe I should just call all of them turnings.) All of the ash in that stack was given to me by the owner of a local woodworking school. It's a bunch of small offcuts leftover after a celebrity woodworker came to town to help students make bench. I like the shape of this bowl. I like the grain. And I like the blue stripe. It's small, about 3 1/2 in. dia. by 2 1/2 in. tall.
By the way, no box this week either. I've had a very busy two weeks outside of the shop, but I'll have a new box up next week. I don't have a box for this week (I'm hard at work on a pretty cool one, though), so here's a little bowl I turned last weekend. I choose a piece of flatsawn ash, because I knew that the end and edge grain would flow nicely in straight lines all the way around the outside of the bowl. It's a cool effect. There's also a very nice chatoyance. Sadly, my photography and lighting skills aren't quite good enough to capture it. The bowl is about 2 1/8 in. tall and the diameter is nearly 5 in. at the lip.
Superficially, this box is almost exactly like box 28, which I wrote about last week. The obvious differences between them: woods, milk paint colors, pin shapes. But I think these differences make for two boxes that each have their own soul. A coworker at the magazine picked up on this right away. Box 28, she said, is feminine, while this box is its masculine counterpart. This distinction in their character can be explained, at least in part, by the choice of woods. The body of this box is mahogany. It's deep, rich color gives a sense of formality. This box would sit nicely in one of those obnoxious, wood-paneled club rooms with leather chairs where men sit around smoking cigars, drinking after-dinner port, and deriding the peasants like me. The sycamore of box 28, even though it has a lovely shimmer, is more gentle, more loving. The beautiful curl of the figured top (and bottom) reinforce the box's formality, especially when compared to the earthy—and a bit carnal—warmth of the apple I used for box 28. The apple is a late-autumn nap by the wood stove with a soft but somewhat saucy lady friend. (What? That's not the image that the color, texture, and smell of apple evokes in your mind?) The curly veneer on this box is a well-fitting suit and tie, a freshly-shaven face, and an Old Fashioned in your hand. The shape of the pins also contributes to the difference in soul between the two boxes. Here I've used 3/16 in. square mahogany plugs over some white oak pins. (The plugs are very shallow, about 1/16 in. deep.) Straight sides are harder than the softness of a circle. Even the choice in milk paint colors emphasis the difference in soul. Marigold yellow, which I've used on this box, is a strong, bold color, especially set against the mahogany. The green I used on box 28 just doesn't strike the same tone. It's welcoming. It wants company, I think, where the marigold yellow sings its independence. What does this all mean? It points to the importance of choosing the correct woods, colors, and details for your work. Everything affects the overall character or soul of a piece: the color of the wood, the grain of the wood, the joinery, the size of the joinery, the choice of secondary and accent wood, the amount of secondary and accent wood (or paint), and a thousand other details to boot. This is the real work of a furniture maker. This is where you make or break a piece. And why it's more important to make something, then make another thing, then a third thing, and then a fourth than it is to worry about the tool you're using or the technique you used to cut a joint. That's how I see it anyway. For me, the journey is as much (no, actually it's more) about the aesthetics of what's being as how it's being made. Random thought time:
This style of box has been around for ages. The ends are rabbeted into the front and back. The joints are reinforced with pins. A liner keeps the lid in place. Honestly, I have no fondness for the design. But I was curious to see what I could do with these design details. Here is how I went about giving this well-traveled box design my own spin. I started by picking the lumber. I have some quartersawn sycamore—well, it's really riftsawn, but it's nice—and decided to use it for the body. I like the hint of warm, earthy brown underlying the overall lightness of the wood. Cherry might have worked for the pins, lid, and bottom, but it's a very rich color, especially after oxidizing for a year or so. And it would eventually be too strong for the sycamore. So, no cherry. Instead, I went back to me favorite: apple. I had some shopsawn apple veneer that I knew would work for the top and bottom, and I just happened to have some apple pins sitting around, too. The apple's color is muted enough to compliment rather than contrast with the sycamore. And the apple's variated color is a good match for the multitude of hues in the sycamore. I sorted through the apple veneer and settle on this particular piece because of the small inclusion in the upper left corner and the three little knots in the lower right hand corner. These imperfections add interest to an otherwise calm piece of apple. And that's important, because both the sycamore and the apple are subdued otherwise. After picking the woods to use, I next thought about whether or not to use any milk paint. Just kidding. Of course I was going to use milk paint. The actual questions: What color and where? My home-cooked green is a great match for apple and I thought it would go nicely with the sycamore, too. On the outside, I wanted the apple lid and subtle shimmer of the sycamore to predominate, so I only painted the edges of the top and bottom. This is in keeping with my belief that you should only use three woods/colors on a piece: a primaryThe inside of the box is a different story altogether. I like a nice pop of color when you open a box or cabinet. So, I painted the inside faces of the top and bottom and the liner. The darkness of the green stands out nicely against the sycamore body. The only thing I would have differently is to have not painted the inside face of the bottom. Instead, I would have glued a nice piece of fabric down. I have some great light-green fabric with lovely little flowers (I am not ashamed that I think of things like this, and I like flowers) on it that would have been awesome in this box. Alas, I remembered too late. The bottom was already glued in place. I also thought a bit about the box's size. I wanted to make something bigger than the one's I've been making. I like the proportions. It's about 7 1/2 in. long and 3 1/2 in. wide. I think the sides are 3 in. tall, and the top and bottom are about 1/8 in. proud. Proportions are always important. Now, for a word from our sponsor, the good folks at Random Thoughts, Inc.
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AuthorI love furniture design, and smart techniques. This blog is about both. Archives
August 2020
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