It’s been a long time since a simple box post.  This box has so much wrong with it – I just had to be done with it.  That said though, I like many of the new ideas (new for me) that it holds.

The bottom is a fatter than two inch slab of pine carved out to about a half an inch of thickness on its base.  Then there’s a strip of cherry, and then walnut, and then redwood rounding out the lower box/bowl thing.  It is very compellingly irregular on close examination.  One thing is if you pretend you are much smaller than it and sailing by in a dinghy then it could look like a big ship that was trying to disguise itself as a fancy picnic basket.  Read that again..

There it is in a symbolic context – you readers of signs note what warrants noting.

It began from a lid for another box that, because it was too wide and the handle came to the edge, could not be made narrow enough for that box, so the lid went in search of another box.  The lid too actually angled out a little from the handle, something vaguely like a square-ish butterfly.  The lid was not finding natural mates in boxes to be lid of.  That’s a piece of tineo in the center though, for people who pay attention to things like that, and there’s orange osage and chechen and walnut and mahogany and oak and red birch in the lid, not a lid one would readily abandon.

A little bit of science got involved, about how could an ellipse be constructed such that the mid-points of each side were all that were left of each side?  Loci were located using a string and two pins.  An ellipse was drawn and then cut out.  This ellipse served as the shape of the cutout of the redwood, walnut, cherry, and pine.  And inner ellipse, 3/8 of an inch within, was drawn on the first three and cut out.  Three wooden zeroes.  I was feeling very masterly at this point.  I routed out the pine oval, creating a super-sized soap dish sort of thing and glued the perfectly sized zeroes atop it.

The rest just came together like nobody’s business.  I’ve got this thing now, and probably the market cornered too.  Marketing inquiries welcome.

But really it was fun.  A lot of the time the main missions are saving some work and learning something, and those things were accomplished.  And it could hold marbles, really any sort of otherwise loose dry little dry goods, and do it with style and uniqueness.

Happy New year once again to all.  When a year begins as auspiciously as this there is no telling the possible upside.