Wood Shop Jewelry Box

Back in high school I had the opportunity to take a wood shop class where I learned how to make objects out of wood. I had several projects including a birdhouse and a cutting board, both of which I gave to relatives, as well as a jewelry box. The Woods I chose to use are cherry wood and walnut, both of which are my favorite dark colored woods. The other kids in my class used a small dowel for a hinge on their boxes, but my lid was cut too thin, so I salvaged some hinges off of another jewelry box I had that I didn't care for. I found out that brass screws are very soft and so they are hard to get into a hard wood without damaging. Fortunately, I positioned the hinges on the inside of the box, so you can't see that the heads of the screws are a little messy looking from the outside of the box.

All pictures are by me unless otherwise noted. Check me out on Twitter.

DIY Clay Decodens

Recently I've been getting interested in Decoden, cute little items such as kitty faces and cupcakes or other food or kawaii related items. Since these items tend to be rather expensive and a little difficult to find, I decided to try making my own with some colored clay I had. I started by making cherries, then moved on to cookies and macaroons as well as frosting and whipped cream. The cherries turned out alright, but my favorite items are the frosted star cookie I made and the macaroons. For all of the cookies I mixed some pale yellow clay with a bit of brown clay to get a color similar to other decoden cookies I've seen. For the frosting I mixed small pieces of colored clay and some white liquid clay together until the solid clay was mostly broken up, then drizzled it on the cookie. I attempted the same thing to make frosting, just adding more solid clay, but it didn't turn out especially well. This could be because I was using a oven bake clay instead of a self hardening clay like most home made decoden are made out of. It's also possible I didn't add enough solid clay to make a good mixture since I was getting rather tired of breaking up and mixing the clay. Anyways, here's a picture of the decoden I made minus the whipped cream which was added afterwords.

The larger macaroon is in half still because I put whipped cream in the middle after the initial baking. Sorry for the low image quality; I'll try to get better pictures of the items up later. All images were taken by me unless otherwise noted. Check me out on Twitter.

Japanese Dolls and Geishas

Here's another one of my collections, this time featuring my items with traditionally garbed Japanese women. I have a statue, a doll, and a note pad in this collection (see below).

The statue features a lady wearing a kimono doing a traditional Japanese art: Ikebana or flower arranging. I like how delicate this statue is and how it mostly uses soft colors that all blend nicely together.

The next item is the doll. I believe that this doll is a highly simplified version of the Hinamatsuri, Japanese girl's day, Ohime-sama doll as it is in a similar style to other Hinamatsuri dolls and has a tiny fan, like the full sized versions of Ohime-sama have. I love how simple and small this doll is while still being very elegant and detailed.

The last item in this collection is the note pad. It's a very pretty note pad with a geisha featured on the front. The paper inside has a nice delicate pattern using different shades of purple. The outside has lot of metallic gold accents, making it very difficult to get a good image of the cover.

All images are by me unless otherwise noted. Check me out on Twitter.