I both love and hate this box. I turned the bottom quite some time ago, and it was inspired by some Japanese tea cups that I've seen. I love its shape. But then it needed a top. I like the top. I also like pull. But when the pull is put on the top and top and bottom, you get a freaking apple. And I don't like that at all. Of course, everyone who has seen it, held it, and opened it has loved it. Evidently, it would make a great sugar container for some tea drinkers I know. This is a case where I have to trust what those folks say. My dislike for the box comes from the fact that I had set out to make a box that gives a strong nod to some understated but undoubtedly gorgeous Japanese tea pottery I've seen. I ended up with a somewhat kitschy apple box. Perhaps I'll take a few more shots at the lid. I have several other ideas about how to make it, all of which would take the apple stink off the box. Enough complaining. There is still a lot to like about this box. First, the lovely shape of the bottom. It fits my hands perfectly. Had I been a potter, this would be a wonderful tea cup. (Handles, as I understand it, are a bad thing on tea cups. If you can't hold it by wrapping your hands around a full tea cup, then the tea is too hot to drink. I don't tea—or coffee—but this is what I've been told.) The milk paint finish also is lovely. It's a homemade green that I made my mixing marigold yellow and Federal blue. The "texture" in the finish comes from the brush strokes. There's a particular way to brush on the paint that leaves marks like this. The finish, I think, looks very much like a pottery glazing, which is the look I was after. The lid is straight Lexington green. To emphasize the difference between the two, I finished the lid with shellac and wax where the body has only wax. Shellac darkens milk paint much more than wax alone. It compliments the homebrew green quite well. The curve of the lid is meant to pick up on the curve of the body, and the top of the pull is meant to bring the curve to a close. The three aren't exactly matched, but that's OK. The connection is suggested, and a suggestion is often better than an explicit statement. By the way, the pull is turned from the wortled heartwood of a quizzical pear tree. Lovely stuff with great color. I left the top rim of the bottom and its interior unfinished. I turned the bottom from hard maple. The stark creamy white is a nice surprise when you open the box. The pale rim is a nice way to separate the lid from the body. Eventually, it will darken to the lovely honey gold that maple becomes, and that will be a nice touch, too. A few random thoughts:
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OK, before I get to the latest box, let me take a moment to point out that this is box 26. I'm halfway there. It's been 18 weeks since I posted boxes 1 and 2. I'm very happy, but also bit surprised that I've been able to crank out boxes so quickly. I'm also relieved, because I have some challenging boxes in the queue, and some might take me more than a week to make. That's OK now, because I'm well ahead of schedule.
Well, let's get to box 26. Although it's not immediately obvious, I used a peculiar technique to make this one. Take a look at the end of the box. That's end grain. Not surprising. This could be a bandsaw box. But it's not. It's a hollow chisel mortiser box. I took a solid piece of ash, ripped off a slice to be the top and then headed over to the mortiser. I then mortised out the inside of the box. This could be one of the smartest things I've done in the shop, but it's more likely one of the dumbest. I suppose I'll find out after a very dry Connecticut winter. If it stands up to severe contraction and then some Spring expansion, I'll be happy. I think it will, but even if it doesn't it was still fun to make. It took all of 3 minutes to hollow out the box and that's pretty cool. This particular piece of ash is an offcut from the ash I used to make turn this little hollow form vessel. I love the super tight and straight grain on the sides. The end grain is good looking, too. Because the ash is almost perfectly quartersawn, the top and bottom are flatsawn. The bottom doesn't matter much, because you never see it, but the top is another story. I didn't want some ugly flatsawn grain messing up this box, so I decided to paint the top before I even cut it free from the blank. I didn't chose the color (Federal blue) until after I had hollowed out the box. I like the blue here because it stands out against the slightly-brown creaminess of the ash. I also painted the underside of the top, so that the space between the top and box body would be more than just a shadow line. Speaking of the top, I rabbeted around it's bottom edge (the rabbet is the same size as the one around the box's bottom) to create the space between the top and box. I then glued a thin piece of maple to the underside of the top. This thin piece fits into the box and keeps the lid in place. As you can see, the underside of the top is also painted. If you've used a hollow chisel mortiser before, you know that the drill bit cuts a little deeper than the chisel. It leaves nasty drill bit marks. There was no way to get rid of them (without extensive and tedious chisel work), so I just cut a bottom from some thin maple, painted the top surface and then put it in the box. I was going to glue it in place, but when I was testing the fit, it got stuck, so I just forced it all the way down. If it falls out this winter, I'll glue it down. A few random thoughts.
This is a little guy. It's about 3 in. tall and 2 1/2 in. at the widest diameter. I finished it with a very light cut of shellac and then wax. The grain accentuates the form of the vessel so well that I just couldn't bring myself to paint over it as I had originally planned to do. And that's all I have to say about that.
One more thing: I plan to start posting more of my turnings and furniture, but with very few words. They'll be photo tours, so to speak. This is the first of two boxes that I hope to post this week. I missed last week, so I'm trying to catch up a bit—even though I posted four boxes the week before. I began this box back at the beginning of July, at the Lie-NIelsen open house. It sat around because I've had so much else to build. (I made Shaker inspired cupboard this summer, for example.) But I glued it up this past weekend and made the top and bottom. I'm glad it's finally done, because it's a fantastic little box. It's my take on a box made by Fine Woodworking's executive art director, Mike Pekovich. I love the simplicity of having a bottomless box fit over a box with no top. I wish I'd thought of this first! Mike's box has a curly maple top—finished smooth with a nice luster—over an ebony bottom. He left the ebony rough on the outside (milling marks from the bandsaw), just burnishing the surface with some steel wool. The contrast between the surface textures is fantastic. I've held this box and it's truly wonderful. My version of the box has an apple top and a hard maple bottom. Of course, there a dash of milk paint, too. Painted the exterior of the maple bottom as well as the top face of the bottom panel. Only the inside faces and top edges of the maple was left natural. The bottom panel is plywood and glued into a rabbet. It's just a bit proud of the bottom sides, so that sit just a smidgen off the surface. The top box, I think, is gorgeous. The apple is amazing. I love the variegated color, and the green of the bottom is a perfect match. The top panel is plywood—like the bottom panel—and glued into a rabbet. I did paint the inside surface and the edge of the top panel with the same green milk paint. I like that little bit of green on the top box. It's a nice accent that picks up the bit of green that you can seen when the top box is over the bottom one. The box is wonderfully minimalist, I think, and modern in the best way. As you can tell from the pictures, the box was made to hold business cards. This is the first box of the 25 I've written about so far that was made for a specific purpose. I think the box design works well for the purpose because you can flip the top box over and stick the bottom box back into it and have the cards ready for the taking. I made the box to carry my cards when I go on the road to demonstrate or teach. It's such a pain to carry a big stack of cards and keep them clean, neat and tidy. I have an idea for a thinner box for business cards that I might get to soon. It should fit into a coat pocket. I actually started a second box along with this one (walnut top, similar bottom but to be painted marigold yellow), and I might finish it one day, but won't count it as one of my 52 boxes. A few random thoughts.
I made this set of four boxes quite some time ago, but I didn't not what to do about pulls for the three small boxes up front, so they sat. I'm not crazy about the pulls I eventually turned for them, but at least the boxes are done now. If I were to turn them again, I think that I would give them a more pronounced inward taper from top to bottom. The problem is that they are so small that it's hard to get too much shape on them without risking too narrow a diameter for the tenon and lower section of the pull. OK, enough about what I don't like. (At any rate, the turned pulls are the only part of these boxes that I'm not thrilled with.) The idea for this box has been beating about in my head for a long time. I've sketched out numerous versions of it, and I might make a few of the other versions, too. (One version I'd like to try involves a set of small round boxes arranged radially around a rectilinear box.) I decided on this particular arrangement because I knew that the boxes would not be hard to make, leaving me to focus on the pedestals beneath them. For me, the pedestals are not just a place to put the boxes, but also a way to create negative space around the boxes. It's the particular arrangement of the boxes, included the shadow lines between them, that makes this set work. This meant that I needed to design them in such a way as to ensure that the boxes always maintain that negative space when the pedestals are fully loaded. The four sides of the pedestal are made like a mitered box. The bottom fits into a rabbet, and the thin "top" into a groove cut into the sides. To create the defined recesses for the three square boxes, I fit dividers into dadoes cut into the front and back. These dividers also have grooves for the colored "tops." (By the way, the colored "tops" are just pieces of 1/8 in. thick cherry painted with milk paint.) There was quite a bit of math involved in getting every thing sized right so that the spaces between the boxes would be the same size and would put the outside ends of the first and third boxes in line with the ends of the long box in back. It also took some figuring to determine how thick the sides of the pedestals should so that the boxes would be inset the amount I wanted. But I was able to manage (and I damn well should be able to, given the amount of education I have! It might have all been in the humanities, but I did well in calculus, too.). I really like the proportions of the square boxes. I started designing the boxes by determining the width of the rectangular box, because I knew that the square boxes would have the same dimension. I then had to do some work to get three square boxes to fit into the length of the long box. In other words, I sketched out different lengths for the long box, trying out various widths of the spaces between the square boxes. Then I worked on the space between the rectangular box and the there square ones. After I figured out all the spacing, I turned to the pedestals. I think it all turned out well. The recesses that hold the boxes are painted to match the lid of the box that fits into each one. For the rectangular box, which has a lid made from some very old white pine (salvaged from studs in my 100+ year old house), I mixed up a custom yellow that's close to the color of the pine. I like the little surprise you get from the colored recesses when you pick up one of the boxes. I had these boxes in the office today, and I heard several folks ooh and aah when lifting up the boxes. That's a great response, and it made me happy. And no one said a word about the turned pulls—as woodworkers were always harder on ourselves than we should be. OK, time for some random thoughts.
There were several boxes I could have chosen for box 20, but I went with this one because of its link to the last three I shared. I made the body for this one at the same time I made the other three, with the intention of painting it and using a lid from natural wood. Otherwise, it's the same as those three boxes. (It's the same size as the smallest of those three, about 2 1/2 in. tall.) And prepare yourself for at least one more go at this one. I want to experiment with different ways of making it. I want to see how it works as a bandsaw box, but I'm also tempted to hollow out the body with a hollow chisel mortises for kicks. So, I think I see two more in the near future. At any rate, on to box 20. The body is painted with a custom green milk paint that I mixed from Federal blue and Marigold yellow milk paint. I really like it. In fact, it has earned a place alongside Marigold yellow as my favorite. It is very close in color to a glaze used a lot of Arts & Craft pottery I have seen. (There seems to be some in every RAGO catalogue that we get at work. I don't know why we get them, but I'm glad we do because there is always a ton of great furniture—everything from A&C to Midcentury Modern to Nakashima.) I've even figured out a way to apply it with a brush that makes it look very much like a ceramics glaze. I know that many woodworkers would question why I'd want that. After all, don't we make things from wood because we love its natural beauty? Absolutely, but I've been fascinated with the amazing ceramics I've seen when teaching at Peters Valley Craft Center and I've been working towards incorporating something akin to glazes in my work. This is especially true of my work at the lathe. I want to turn pottery on a lathe. Maybe when I'm done with the box project I'll do 52 turnings in 52 weeks. I originally want to make a cocobolo lid for this box, but because of how I make it (turning a round lip to fit into the round cavity in the box), the lid begins as a rather think blank that can be chucked up in the lather. I don't have any cocobolo the right dimensions to do this. But I do have a lot of offcuts from some 8/4 air-dried walnut slabs. I knew that some of that walnut would have a nice, rich brown color when finished, so that's what I used. I like the color with the green paint. I also like the bold, straight grain visible on the top face of the lid. To make the walnut darker than it would be when finished only with shellac (my usual finish), I applied a coat of Watco before the shellac. I forgot to do any random thoughts the last two times I shared boxes. So, here you go.
Long ago I heard that good artists borrow, but great ones steal. I have no recollection of where I heard it or who spoke it. On the surface it's an odd claim, because theft is not often praised, and the thief rarely lauded as great. So, I thought about it (for a long time because I'm not too smart) and eventually decided the best way to understand this aphorism is in terms of possession. If I borrow something from you, it still belongs to you. But if I steal it, then I've made it mine. We could argue about the accuracy of this second claim in relation to your car, television or iPad. But I don't really care about that. Let's think about what it means in terms of artistic creativity—and furniture makers are artistically creative. If I borrow a design detail from you, then all I do is lift it directly from your work and plunk it down in mine. I make no effort to alter it, to weave it in seamlessly, to make it my own. It remains alien to my design aesthetic. A knowledgeable person would see my work and say, "That bit there is taken from Maker X, and it doesn't really fit here." The worst case of this is the person who simply copies wholesale from another maker and attempts to pass of the design as his own. (This happens. Within the last year I saw a person present a table as his own when every design detail and even some rather unique techniques were borrowed from a regular and very well known Fine Woodworking author. No acknowledgement was given to him.) However, if I steal a design detail from you, then I take it in, digest it, and weave it into my design vocabulary. Only then do I use it. It's no longer recognizably yours. It has become a seamless and natural part of my own work. That takes skill, and I have no problem doing it or having it done to me. And this brings me to an email I received from a maker in France who has been reading my blog. He sent me photos of a box he made that was inspired by box 5. I was thrilled to see it. There is no greater compliment than to be told that you've inspired another furniture maker. It encourages me to keep designing and making boxes. You can see photos of his box below. When viewed next to a photo of my box, the connection is obvious. However, you can also tell that the maker made an attempt to produce a box that is truly an expression of his design aesthetic and not mine. From the wood selection, to the joinery, to the fact that he used inserts instead of paint on the inside of the box. (By the way, I love the wood choice for those inserts.) He also changed the arrangement and size of the individual compartments. So feel free to steal from my work, but please don't borrow. By the way, if you'd like to know more about the history of the aphorism, Google reveals that T. S. Eliot (although not the first person to use it in some form), explained it pretty much as I do here. However, I did not know this until I sat down to write this entry. He explains it better than I do, and was a way, way, way better poet than me, too. I knew a period of time like this would come. Two weeks ago I was involved in a week long photo shoot for one of my articles. Last week I was in Las Vegas for work. This week I'm parenting alone, and next week I'm on vacation. So, there is no way I'm going to get a new box posted this week or next week. I have boxes under way, I just won't get a chance to finish and photograph them in time. (A set of four is near completion, but not close enough.) That's OK. By my reckoning, I'm at least two weeks ahead of schedule. And I'm going to take this time away to complete the drawings for several more-complicated boxes that I'd like to make. When I return from vacation, I'll be moving full steam ahead. I'm nearly half way to my goal in far less than half a year. However, I do plan to write one or two posts over the next 10 or so days. They'll be about design more generally. I hope you'll enjoy them, too. And perhaps they'll provoke a bit of discussion. In the meantime, enjoy a short video of me planing a bullnose on the edge of a cupboard top. I made these boxes because I asked myself a question while driving back from Maine. The question: What's the easiest and quickest box I could make? The answer, I thought, would be to drill out the center of a block of wood. Because of the round interior, the lid would need a matching round "plug" to keep it in place. Turning this would be quick and not difficult. So, I started with a technique and the technique largely determined the design. This explains, I think, why the boxes have a mechanized or mass produced feel to them. Normally, I design and then figure out how to make a box or piece of furniture. It results in work that has a far greater sense of having been made by a human hand. At any rate, I think I'll give this reversed working order another shot down the road--to see if I can eliminate the imprint left behind by allowing the technique to determine the design. I used some 8/4 cherry for the boxes, and after milling the board square, planing the faces clean, etc. the boxes ended up being about 1 3/4 in. square. I cut the bodies to length (2, 3 and 4 in. long), then chucked them into my lathe, where I drilled the holes with a 1 1/2 in. Forstner bit. This works fine, but my bit is getting a bit dull, so the holes aren't as clean as I'd like. The lids were also made on the lathe. After turning the round rabbet that fits into the box, I cut them to length at my bandsaw. The visible thickness of the lid is about 1/2 in. The process of making the boxes wasn't very hard, but it did have some problems that needed to figured out. For example, I should have cut the boxes to length after drilling them out. The lathe chuck left marks in the body that had to be planed away. Had the boxes been long, I could have just cut off the area with the marks. I really should have thought of this before I made them. (But I started making the boxes before I really thought through everything carefully.) Well, enough about technique. Here's what I like about the design. The best things about the boxes, I think, are their vertical orientation and the end grain on the tops. Using a piece of riftsawn cherry makes both work well. The straight grain running vertically on all four sides compliments the design, and also creates cool, diagonal end grain. I also like the bit of separation between the body and lid. It was created by rabbetting the lid after the round "plug" was turned. As for the the other side of the coin (what I don't like) I'm not sure if the painted edge of the lids works. Had the edge been thinner, it would look much better. Also, the round interior is not so great (I wonder if the shop's hollow chisel mortiser could hollow out the tallest of these boxes? I think have some expermenting to do). This week I took another stab at a bandsaw box. I decided to stay with walnut and marigold yellow paint to have a connection from my first attempt. It also has a similar shape, but because the blank was much wider, I was able to give the sides a more pronounced curve. But this one is shorter, as it was made from a piece of 8/4 air-dried walnut, and I like the shape. The first one was made from a piece of 8/4 walnut (from the same board), but was turned on edge, so that the width (instead of the height) came from the 2 in. dimension. I took other design details from the earlier box. I rabbeted the bottom edge of the sides to give the box some lift off of the surface, and the lid overhangs the sides.
I also rabbeted the top edge of the sides, a detail I borrowed from the last three boxes that I made. And borrowing from the white oak version of those three boxes, I painted the top (and bottom) rabbet. I especially like this detail on the top edge as it emphasizes the separation between the lid and box. The milk paint continues on the inside of the box. I did not clean up the machine marks on the inside, so there is also a nice texture to the interior, and after I sanded the paint to smooth it, a bit of the walnut color peeked through. It's a nice touch. As for the process of making a bandsaw box, I think I did better this time. I used the same technique, but added a shopmade pivot fence, so that when I cut the sides free from the middle I could control their thickness more easily. I liked having the solid point of reference to work off. |
AuthorI love furniture design, and smart techniques. This blog is about both. Archives
August 2020
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