Leftovers

We found ourselves trying to answer the age-old question: What do you do with unused wood? In our case, we had a number of pieces cut into .5" x .5" rails from the scarf box project. What could we possibly do with those? Well, we had one idea.

First we needed to cut them all to 2.5" in length (this will be clear in a second). We rigged up a temporary shim on the saw to ensure everything was a uniform length.

That yielded a range of pieces in the same light-medium-dark tones as the box. In all we cut a bunch of pieces and started gluing them together in layers of 5. If you're counting at home, that would make 5 layers of .5" wood or...2.5". See? Clever, right?

After some trial and error with glue and clamps, we settled on creating a temporary rig to create a tight 2.5" x 2.5" housing for our pieces as they dried.

The result is...a paperweight or maybe the world's least movable Rubik's Cube. We don't know, we just make the things.

Here's one version without our favorite clear sealer (on left) and one with. Also these are the  two variations we made--one rotating the layers and one keeping everything in the same direction.

Finally, here are the full results in all their glory. Not a hard project but an amusing one.

Feeling boxed in

If necessity is the mother of invention, it's also the mother of woodworking projects. In this case, we needed a new, bigger, and nicer looking place to store the "currently in use" scarves. Fortunately, there's an app for that. Wait, that's not right.

Fortunately, there's a wood store nearby that can supply a raft of options, from morado to oak to snake wood to some thing we don't even remember. We added some nice cherry and walnut from HD. Our goal was to have options at the light, medium, and dark ends of the color palette. That sounds really familiar.

Anyway, the first step was to cut a bunch of .5" x .5" rails because we had a design that would  layer them in alternating hues with a finished height of 4.5" and 9 x 14" on the inside.

Then we paired them up. Each follows a dark-light-medium progression, but off-set. This will make sense in a second, trust us.

We liked the trick from the jewelry box project that hid the plywood base and added surface area for gluing, so we notched the four rails that would be the base of the box. First we made demos.

With all that set we started figuring out the order of the rails. We alternated not just the colors but the lengths to allow for a staggered, pseudo-dovetail look at the corners. This has the added benefit of being better for gluing.

Next we had to glue and clamp everything in place. Our trusty Bessey's worked for the first two rounds, but this has nine layers in total. So we needed a new plan.

We tried the new corner clamp, but things shifted around too much. So we went with an old standby that allowed us to do two layers (1 inch) per round. Even with these, we found the need to supplement with some basic straight clamps to nudge corners into place and (importantly) to hold the layers together. As we always say, you can never have too many clamps. 

It all seemed to work out because there's a satisfied customer. Here are a couple angles and a closeup on a corner. That tiger-y wood from the second picture above added some nice vibrancy and fire to the finished piece.