Jewelry Box

Since I have started working with wood my girlfriend was always pushing me to create a jewelry box for her, even if she does not have too much jewelries. I thought this is a compulsory task for every man who has started to do anything of wood.

I did not have any experience with box creating and joinery so I asked some help from an experienced one of my relatives and also had proper tools for cutting and planing. So he helped me to create the box.

When it was ready I just wanted to put some simple but nice carving on the top. I draw several patterns and borders and finally I chose this one:

I also covered the bottom of the box with some soft material:

And also the drawers:

Finally I put a hinge between the body and the top:

Salad Spoons

After my previous spoon and the paddle I realized that these kind of things are not really usable, at least nowadays, and I don't have place for them in my flat, because they are not really in harmony with the style of it. I wanted to make something more useful and usable thing.

My girlfriend is a vegetarian and she would be pleased with a pair of salad spoons, so I had the plan. I just needed some material to do it. I had only some soft wood for carving, but those were not good for everyday usage, I wanted some harder wood. I remembered that last year my parents, who are living on the countryside, had cut down some bigger branches from their nut tree and these branches are just drying under a roof and waiting to be burnt . So I thought some of them would be good for this task. Next time when I visited them, I checked these branches and I found a trunk which can provide me a pair of spoons. I cut into two pieces and draw the design of the spoons on the wood. With a jigsaw I cut the shape of the spoons following the lines and with knives I carved to the final shape. At the end I sanded them and covered with some paraffin oil.

Wooden Spoon

While I was surfing on the Internet I saw a lot of nicely carved wooden spoons. I decided to create one. I took a piece of alder wood and created a simple design.

Paddle

I am not a big folk fan, but a paddle could be a good task for practice. The material was shaped, I just had to do the carving. I searched a lot on the Internet for patterns and samples. When I had a larger collection of the patterns I tried to draw a composition of folk motives on the surface of the wood. This was the hardest part, the carving was much easier than I expected.

Finally I had this:

And the other side: