My first little box - a late Christmas gift for my daughter

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First time making a jewellery box and it was a great fun project. I didn't quite make my self-imposed Christmas deadline and had a few issues along the way and some helpful advice from a few people here for which I am very grateful.

This box is very much influenced by one made by J Katz Moses on his youtube channel and it tied in with my Daughter's love of Japenese film, Manga etc.
I'd had a few offcuts including a guitar neck blank that I messed up the truss rod routing on and a small board of what I assumed to be Sapele. The idea was to have a mitred spline box with continous grain, not done this before! I don't have a planer/thicknesser or table saw so flattening was done with a couple of old Stanley USA planes and jointing the edges was done on the router table and fine tuned with planes.

I cut the mitres on a router coping sled which end up in my tray side being shorter than i wanted so the piston fit is not as tight as I'd hoped but it's fine.

 

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I wanted a chamfer on the lid but the maple I had wasn't wide enough so after I'd ripped it I glued a strip of rosewood in the centre to widen the board and give a added visual feature. I got some great advice on how to cut the splines on the router table and that went really well. Used a bit more maple for the splines. The leather liner for the trays was cut from a piece of workshop leather from workshop heaven - I used the clean side! and the base of the trays was the lid of an old Champagne box that we used to keep Christmas baubles in.

 

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I sanded to 400 and finished with Chestnuts Sanding Sealer and Acrylic Lacquer aerosols and a coat of microcrystalline wax. I stupidly glued the handle on before adding the leather thread so had to keep wrapping it under and over and of course when i got to the end i'd cut it to short. Oh well!

Overall I loved this project, I learned lots and got to grips with the new bandsaw. And the best thing, my Daughter loved it and kept giving me hugs all day, she said it was her favourite present.