photo tipette

I am a box maker. I am not a photographer. Nevertheless in the spirit of blog writing which I think in my case means writing what I do all day I thought I'd include a photo of how I take my photos!
A roll of photographic paper hanging from the ceiling, one small flash unit with a soft box, an infer-red trigger on the camera and a reflective board. ( sorry, that's not in the photo - I'd taken it away). Camera set to manual with the flash off and that's it - job done!
It did take me years to get to this point though...

sharpening - today's tipette

After I've hammered in the pegs on the sides of the boxes they are faceted - I think there was a photo of this a lttle while ago.
A sharp chisel for this is essential so I thought I'd show you how I sharpen.
Two stones, one medium and one very fine - almost slate like, an eclipse jig and a couple of pieces of MDF glued up to make a measuring jig.
One side of the jig is for plane irons and the othe for chisels.

complete

Just to finish off - here's a couple of pics of the jewellery box finally complete!

Velvet

High time I finished this box!
I attach the velvet to card before lining the jewellery box. Copydex is great for this but it does have an almost magical ability to jump from the container to the face of the velvet. Once it's on the pile of the velvet there's no way it will come off. Take it off and start again. You would think I'd have learnt after all these years.

Back up to date.

I thought I would publish a pic of the jewellery box before the tray was assembled because a week or so ago I was giving daily updates on this box.
Hopefully it will get finished today - finally...

final post of stationery box

As promised - quite a long time ago I know - some pictures of that big stationery box. There are more pics and a description on my website.

hello again!

When you haven't written for a while there's too much or too little to say. Where to start? Computers! Boxes! I had a major computer meltdown problem. I was a tenth of a millimetre away from buying a new one. But Thomas put in a heroic effort and brought it back to life. At one point I wondered if there could be a loose connection inside the wretched thing so I took the back off - but I didn't get to fix anything...
I'll try to catch up.

computers!

I cannot believe that I have spent (or to be more precise) - my son son has spent, ( I mostly just watched) nearly an entire day trying to fix an 'error' on the computer!
Progress on jewellery boxes was nil.
I did manage to put some velvet into some ring boxes while I was watching...
And I was going to post a photo - of my computer - but I couldn't because of .....an error.

curved lid

The lid is now cut to shape -curved both on the underside and the top - and rough sanded. I carve the lid first with an 'arbortech' in an angle grinder then sand it with a rotary sander using a 40grit disc and then with an eccentric rotary sander working my way down to 400 grit.

glued up

The jewellery box is now glued up and ready for its lid. All of the inside surfaces have been sanded to 400grit including both sides of the front and back.

pivot hinge jewellery box

At long last I've started work on a new jewellery box. This one is in elm which is both spalted and burry.  I need some of these made and up on the website for Christmas.So it's all stops out, and head down. Unless it's flyable of course...
I haven't forgotten finished pics of the stationery box - just haven't taken them yet.