Jewellery Box

Right, I think its about time I got stuck into a bit of woodwork. Over the last week and a half I've been working on a commission the wife dropped on me with virtually no notice- cheers! It's one of her friends' 50th birthday next week so she wanted something"special" making. As I had no time to design something myself I shamelessly copied a design for a jewellery box I had seen at the Bodger's Ball (annual gathering of Uk green woodworkers at Cusworth Hall) by Sean Hellman. My apologies for the plagiarism Sean.
Sean makes loads of lovely craft items such as this, besides his larger commissions so I would thoroughly recommend looking out for him at events.
For this box I used Sycamore for the main body of the piece, Elm for the lid and some Elm Burr/ Burl for the hinge posts. I used some brass rod (ex- stair rod) for the hinge pins.The finish is Danish oil buffed with some Carnuba wax. Ideally I would have liked to have dedicated more time to the finish but Hey-Ho no such luxury.

Elm has got to be right up there with Walnut as my favorite timbers to work with. I am currently working on some pots made from Pippy Elm that are my take on Shrink boxes. They are ideal for kitchen treen containers to give as a gift set- I'll make these my next Blog post.

This project saw the first of my coin stash brought into play. Luckily the sixpence is a hair smaller in diameter than a 19mm Forstner bit, so a bit of gentle persuasion got me a nice tight fit

Unfortunately I didn't think to take any WIP photos (must start doing that), but here's some of the stock I started with T-B Burr Elm, Elm, Sycamore

As you may be able to gather I am very much a blue collar bloke so my apologies for grammatical errors etc. Also I have noticed on some blogs they have small photos that can be made larger by clicking. How is this done? does it just happen automatically when you select large size on image upload?

Coming soon- Hollow Pots and making walking sticks..