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Heritage Box

My interest has increasingly been turning to upcycling, creating things from obsolete or unwanted items. Furthermore, I have been trying to recycle items that have a resonance, a connection to those I hold dear. I've started to think of these as 'heritage' items, objects that reflect an association with friends, family or simply older times.

For Pam's birthday this year, I decided to make a heritage box. This being my first box, it was something of a challenge particularly since I use no electric tools other than a rechargeable drill (that was no use here anyway). The design centred around a piece of yew left over from my knife-handle project. We had picked this up on a field next to the Thames near our home and put the piece of branch up in the garage rafters where it seasoned for a few years. The piece was very small and it restricted the sized of the box. This formed the long sides.

A few years ago, our friends Adam & Jenny gave us a pair of wooden bankies (bankie is Afrikaans for bench) once used as stools in a South African school. I modified one of them to reduce its height to make it more useful as a side table, while keeping the side profile. The few offcuts were put in a box of bits-of-wood-that-might-come-in-handy-one-day and these I used for the ends.

The base was made from a piece of an oak floor board given to us by our friends Chris & Stella. This wood had already been used in numerous projects and is of fine quality - it's a pleasure to work with.

The top was made from bog oak from a 6000-year-old plank that Pam and I bought at Treefest at the Westonbirt Arboretum a few years ago, and the inset that seats the lid was made from a slat from the single bed Pam bought when she was sharing a house in Durban back in the early 80s.

The greatest challenge was probably hand-cutting the wood accurately into 5mm thick planks. Ensuring the ends were perfectly square was fiddly as were the albeit simple rebate joins. I used a piece of maroon leather (removable) to line the bottom of the box. The final dimensions are 85x35x35mm. The original design was a slightly longer but it looked a bit coffinesque. Although those of an unkind bent might say it's now merely crypt-like, I prefer to think of it as a miniature blanket box.

I then decided to create a box to present the box using black foam board. The construction mimics that of the wooden box even to the extent of the top with inset. The wooden box was given a black paper loop to secure it, wrapped in black paper and set into a foam board support that floated the box in the middle of the packaging.

April 2018