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over winter break i was pretty bored at home. i talked with my friend chris
and we decided to do something neat to give our break some meaning. after some deliberation
we decided to make boxes. not just any boxes though, jewelry boxes for our respective girlfriends.
of course neither of us had much, if any experience when it came to making boxes of any sort.
and so the project began.. to make boxes we needed wood. chris's dad does a lot of woodwork and he recommended house of hardwood. of course, it was a bajillion miles away from chris's house but we wanted good wood. so, we went.  a.k.a. my pants since there were ten million different kinds of wood we had to go around and see which we wanted to work with. to tell you the truth i can't remember which kind of wood we got. i think i used birch and chris used oak, but that doesn't sound right. whatever.   me deciding on some wood, which is also me looking like a dork yay, we got wood, now fast forward in time a bit. back in chris's garage we had all the material we would need to make our boxes: some wood, some screws, power tools, etc. time to start cutting.   chris and i are real men cutting the wood wasn't so hard, but it was a pain in the ass when the cuts wouldn't come out straight. the plan was to cut a top, bottom, and eight side pieces. attach four sides to each the top and bottom, then hinge the two together. in theory, it should work. in theory.  chris's bottom and four sides, pre-screwing it wasn't so easy. we tried to do neat diagonal joints between the sides but it didn't quite come out the way we hoped... there was some reshaping done. it was pretty frustrating, and i think chris's parents heard more swearing than they had hoped for.  "argh! fuck this fuckin' shit! why doesn't my bottom fit?!" after a few hours of trying to get our sides to attach to the bottoms our boxes started to take shape. i was optimistic that the boxes were gonna rock.  the bottom halves of our boxes, pretty sweet! after another few hours of cutting and screwing, our tops were finished. since these boxes were for our girlfriends we decided to personalize them by etching small messages into the tops with a soldering iron.   soldering wood sucks. it takes ages to make our boxes look somewhat professional we stained them with some minwax crap. it made my hands and fingernails turn orange, but the boxes came out a nice golden color.   look at the corner of the box on the right. blah! sid came over to chris's house when we wer finishing up the boxes. he must be an exciting guy because all of the pictures with him are blurry.  don't ask, 'cause i don't know we used little wood pieces ("woodsies") to decorate the tops of the boxes. chris made some flowers on his. so did i. that's about all we could do with petal shaped wood pieces.   i love how the top doesn't sit straight on the bottom. it looks better in real life a jewelry box wouldn't be a jewelry box without a cool interior. we got some velvet crap and nailed it to the inside. believe me, it's easier said than done. finally, the box was finished!   it came out better than i thought it would.. especially for my first time well, that's it. my girlfriend (lan) seemed to like it ("oh, i love it! wow!"), so i guess it was a worthwhile project after all. tell me what you think. |
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