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A commissioned set of gift boxes based on these, each themed around a one-word prompt of the recipients’ hobbies: Photography, gardening, pottery, and quilting

Organizing the craft fair cruft while stuff on the bigger projects cures, got a lot of variations of these little boxes made of two plys of 1/8″ wood stock around.

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Inner layer of box-jointed maple, outer layer of cherry or some dark contrasting wood with a decorative pattern and some reinforcements to help keep the sides and bottom together. Everything’s laser-cut out of two sheets of stock, usually in batches, then just gets glued up and sanded, about as simple to construct as it gets.

This particular version has a couple of experimental features to make them faster/cheaper: some smaller rounded stone inlays that just get punched out on a drill press for faster production and a non-removable lid that lifts up and slides back, rather than pulling off fully, both so it doesn’t get lost and to eliminate the fitting needed to get a nesting one to seat cleanly. Probably a dead end, people can’t figure out how to open them and I don’t really wanna go this hard into competing with the scented candle stand for someone’s $20

Some ancestor versions in different styles

Years back I’d go to parking lot craft fairs and the like and make jewelry, polish a cab and set it with a little oxypropane torch and all while you waited (frequently for hours). I thought it was a neat way to do custom work and show people the process and turn my old rock collection into something fancier. Mostly gave up because it was aggravating dealing with the same kind of question from everyone who stopped by, over and over – is this stone for curing my bunions, is it right for a Sagittarius, does it give off ‘healing energy’. And like, it’s a rock, do you usually find real doctors lighting things on fire in an empty lot, get real

obviously it’s for binding the curse of the werewolf

 As far as I know there’s only one shop in downtown Santa Fe where you can get these, as cabs, under the extremely made-up name “talaverite”. I couldn’t figure them out for years: weird sedimentary-looking deposit but very hard and takes a high polish; not dyed but those colors in that combination can’t possibly be natural.

If you catch Forrest on a good day, though, he’ll show you one of the roughs he cut it from, with a fossilized 1/4″ bolt partially sticking out. They’re glaze deposits mined from a Mexican tile factory, like Fordites but stony and earthtoned. Aside from looking cool as hell if any magic inheres in stones it’s from the small genre of gems pulled not from the bowels of the earth but from delves into the guts of longrunning heavy industry.

Fish lamp, fish lamp! Its spine is LED, its fins cut for time, his battery is a head™

These pictures don’t really do it justice but this was a pretty nice piece of sycamore scavenged from another furniture maker’s burn pile, turned into a table, and then repurposed again to upgrade a desk. Badly warped when I got it, flattened there was only about a 1/2″ thick slice of wood there, but a single 18″x50″ slab of quartersawn; I don’t even want to think about how old the original tree must have been. As a first try at the collapsing-leg quick-release system shown below, it was kinda eh as a table and has been supplanted by more developed examples, but the top was still a pretty nice piece of wood so I’m glad it found a second life here.

2″x2″x2″ stash box, cherry outer layer, ambrosia maple inner, and uuuuh rocks. Going to rework the lid a bit if I run off another batch of these, initially drew this for a more single-use type design and the lip is still a bit fragile

Frames are pretty boring, but extremely simple to make. No real load on them, no technical demands, just cut a rabbet big enough for whatever you’re going to stuff in there and make four structurally reasonable right angle joints. For the simplest ones I’ll just screw a plywood sheet behind the corners, it gets it very flat and tough and nobody’s going to be popping the picture out and replacing it anyway. Maybe one of these little keys over the front miters, to cover the seam

If you’ve got some cool looking material to work with, you’re done, everyone loves figured wood.

If the material sucks, just stick a thing on it, go crazy. This thing was originally a stack of firewood, all about 6″ long

On occasion, you get one with more complex demands

New transom window screen, ready to go up. The design is a little more, I don’t know, literal? than I usually like to do, but the owner wanted ravens and ravens it does have