12th Century Style Wedding Box, Part V; The Hardware and Finish

 This will be the end of blogging about the wedding box. It was such a major project that I wanted to make several posts about it. Normally, such projects take months or years to complete, so there is plenty of time to make several updates on the progress. In the case with this one, though, it was a commission which had to be completed in less than three months, so there was definitely no extra time for blogging.

Custom made hinge ready to be drilled and the installed

Once the basic concept of the layout and design of the box had been solidified in my mind and I commenced its construction, the concept of hardware began to scratch the back of my mind. Anyone who has tried making medieval furniture will know that there is not much suitable hardware that one can simply order from a catalogue, and even less (actually none that I know of) if you want 12th century style hardware.

As I worked on making the box, I began to realise that if I wanted it to look "right" I would have to make something myself; but how? As the days went by, I slowly began to develop a plan, and once that plan was fully formed, I got right into executing it, right in the middle of the bone carving stage.

Design for an 11th or 12th century box hinge

I have a friend about an hour away, who has a window and door restoration business. Often, he is not able to find hardware that he needs, so he and a couple of his guys have worked together to teach themselves how to do metal casting. I asked him if he would be willing to make something for me if I provided him with sample parts. He gave me a price he said he could do it for, and I got to work.

Once I had a means to my end, it was time to make some parts. I thought about different materials to use, but ultimately decided on making them out of wood. (walnut, to be specific) I then got some paper and a pencil and drew out what I had in mind, stuck the drawing to some timber and started in on it. It took me a bit more than a full day to make the hinge, the catch and a foot, but I had a head start on a foot because about ten years ago I tuned a 9th century style candle stick and cut away sections from the base, in order to carve three feet in the remaining portions. I saved those cut-offs because I thought that they might come in handy at some future date...

Pictures of the process of making the hinge
I cut the parts with a coping saw, then carved and filed
them to their final shape
The 'V' notch on the table was how I supported the work
whilst cutting it out.

I had hoped to be able to watch the process and even help with it, as it is something that I too have long wanted to learn about, but he  was not able to accommodate me the day I dropped off the parts so I saw nothing of it. Two or three weeks later, he met me at my place with some finished feet, a finished casting of the "Lovebirds" and blobs of brass (it was supposed to have been bronze, but something got lost in translation) which had the hinges hiding in them.

The hinges as they were delivered

After the hinges, it was on to a catch

My own invention, but in the spirit of the 
12th century. "Love birds" were a perfect motif 
for a wedding box

Lastly the feet. I started with a section of a turning that I made 
in order to make some 9th century feet for a candle-stick.

The cutting out and polishing of the parts was interesting and a bit of a challenge, but I am handy with more than just a wood saw, so metal is just another material to be cut as needed. Once they were sawn out and the backs cut and filed down, they had to be filed and then polished on a buffing wheel.

I was so pleased with the results and happy that I took the time to do them,; they really added a nice level of authenticity to the entire project.

The case built to conceal the wedding box 
for the delivery.

Since the client had no clue of what I was actually making, and never saw anything of it until the project was finished and delivered, I decided to have a little fun. I built another box of cherry which was large enough to put the bone and intarsia box inside. (It would also serve as a receptacle for the cards that would be given to the newlyweds at the reception). Thus as was my intention, all the client had to say when I delivered the box two days before the wedding was that it was very nice. When they opened it, however the plan proved to have been a great idea. I have never seen any client so astonished and beside themselves for words over anything that I have made. The best comment of all came from the soon-to-be groom who said "people just don't make stuff like this anymore! This belongs in a museum."

Mission accomplished!

Completed 12th century style wedding box with custom
made cast brass hardware ; front and back

12th Century Style Bone Box - Part IIII; The lid and interior

As promised, this post is about the making of the lid. There will be one more post to finish this, which will cover the hardware and finishing up of the project.

Intarsia is finished. At this point, no bone had yet 
been stuck on, save for the centre front.

For the outside of the lid, it was carry on with what was going on for the sides, bone border surrounding intarsia veneers. I did use a different pattern for the top, which was again parts left from another project  done some years earlier. This pattern was larger than what is on the sides, but it still worked and looked good. I have seen a couple medieval intarsia pieces with similar designs, so it is also "period correct". 

After gluing the intarsia

My cutting set-up. This is a saw I made many years
ago the glued-on miter cut piece is a guide.

Gluing the string border.

Even though the previous post shows the bone on the sides, I actually did not start carving the bone until the lid has been veneered as well. Once all the intarsia was finished, I did get to work on the bone, but the stuff for the lid was done once the front and ends of the box was finished. The bone for the back was the very last that was finished and it had a different pattern to it. I will be showing that in my next (and last) post about this box.

I had toyed with the idea of using holly as a substitute for the border of the entire box; I even went so far as cutting up enough strips of it to do the whole project. However, after I carved a bit of the holly and made a comparison with the bone I decided that I definitely liked the bone more, so I stuck with that. For the inside of the lid, however, the holly seemed like a good candidate to save my having to find a bunch more bones, since I had depleted the entire stock at the pet shop.

The plates ready for application

The nails are both functional and decorative

Close-up detail

Even if the holly was not as good for the carving, it was fine for the less complicated inside that I wanted to use. Somewhere I once saw a medieval box that was covered in plates of bone, nailed on with lots of gold pins in a geometric pattern. The memory of this was my inspiration for doing the inside lining of the lid. My pattern for the nails was mainly dictated by the size and shape of the plates of holly. Before applying them, I used wood bleach to bleach them whiter than their natural colour, even though it is already fairly white. With the application of the bleach, the colour is as bright as the bone. 

A lucky find at a fabric shop. 

I had no idea what I would do for the inside of the box, In the back of my mind, as I worked, were rather abstract ideas of block printed textile patterns or some white fabric painted to look like damask. One day I was in a fabric shop and saw a pattern that I realised would work for my project - except the only colour it was available in, was blue and white. I realised, however, that I could probably dye it and make a nicer colour, so I bought a strip of it, put some dye in a jar added the fabric, shook it up for a while, and then removed it. Once it was dry, it was perfect.

Dying the fabric. and the way it looked when still wet

The finished interior

Another nice thing about this piece of cloth, though I did not know it at the time of purchase, was that the pattern was perfect to fit the box. the sides were one square high, the width was two. and the length was three, One cannot get much more "lucky" than that.

To apply the fabric, I used a wheat glue, which is made by cooking a bit of flour and water, with a pinch of salt to prevent moulding before it dries.

12th Century Style Wedding Box, Part III; Bone Borders

I t has only been half as long from my last post about this box, as it was between that and the first one, so perhaps that is an improvement. Also, interestingly, I saw that the last episode was posted on the 19th of October; it is now the 19th of December, (though it is likely to be later before I actually finish this).

The box with the first pieces of carved bone in place
At this point, they are only stuck on with tape

When I began the bone border, I just fished around in one of my drawers and found a couple bone plates that were left from some restoration project. They happened to be the perfect length and width for my needs, so I happily used them. I realised, though, that I would need a lot more to finish. I first looked "on line" (where everything is found, nowadays) and ordered some plates of bone but they turned out to be too thick, or not thick enough to split, and not really long enough either. 

The last time I wanted bones, I had gone to a pet shop where one can find bones intended for large dogs to chew. These have been cleaned and bleached and are all nice and white with no mess to deal with; absolutely perfect for someone who does not want to spend a couple days trying to clean bones. Since they are natural animal (cow) bones, however, there is nothing flat or straight about them, therefore, there is still a lot of work to get flat straight usable plates from of them

Bones ready for slicing
A couple had two faces straight enough to yield
plates from. I wound up using ten of these bones

The first step involves finding the "flattest" (read least curved) side and then grinding that down to be perfectly flat and true, and wide enough to yield a strip of the width that is needed. For the first couple of bones, I did this by hand on a sheet of coarse sandpaper, glued to a plank, however, I soon realised I would be making a career out it so I switched to using a disk sander. That made the process go faster, but I still had to do the final bit of flattening by hand the way I started. The machine just got the bulk of the material out of the way in a quicker manner.

Once the bones had flat faces to them, thin (+/-2mm) plates had to be cut off. This was done with a saw for cutting metal. Bone is much harder than most timbers, but nothing so close to as hard as iron or steel, so the saw made fairly quick work of cutting the plates. Most bones only give one or two pieces that are wide enough and can come from the entire length of bone. (+/- 160mm) In a couple cases, the bone was thick enough to yield two plates from the same side, but this was the exception, not the norm. Usually, by the time you get a flat face, you are already running into the hollow core. A lot of shorter pieces could still be gotten from what was left of the bones, but others actually only yielded a single piece the entire length. I wanted long pieces so there would not be a bunch of joined up lengths. The idea was for a single strips on the vertical and two for each horizontal row. After going back three times to the pet shop, however, I ultimately had to give up and join up some shorter pieces for the back, because I depleted their bone stock, but this is getting ahead of the story.

Several plates cut and joined straight on one edge.
The entire box used more than 3,5 metres of bone

After the "plates" are sliced off they still needed to be trimmed down, this first involved cutting one side straight, and paying attention to how it would best produce the widest piece possible, since most pieces were wider on the ends than in the middle. After one edge was straightened, a parallel line was drawn along the other edge and then cut again. All trimming and width cutting, as well as end trimming was done with the iron saw. A file was used to true up the edges, (much like running a piece of timber over a jointer) once it has been cut. Steffen happened to stop in one day as I was cutting, so he made a video of me doing it, which is below.

That sounds like lots of work, but at this point, we are just getting started, because next comes the actual work of the carving. All the preparatory work is not really even thought about when one views the finished piece. This is usually the case no matter what sort of creation one is viewing; no one gives much thought to what must have gone into its making, and only gives a "like" "dislike" or indifferent response to the visible final product.

Comparing bone to holly
I contemplating using wood instead of bone
but the difference was a lot; in favour of bone

A still from a video of my trying to do this one-handed
Here you can see one of the tools that I made to do this

Design inspiration came from these two boxes that I saw in Cluny

For carving, the first step was to create the outside border. This was first done with a marking gauge and then with a tool to widen and deepen the groove to half-round profile. After that, the piece was divided with pencil marks and the design was laid out. I first tried using some woodcarving tools but they dulled very quickly, so I repurposed a couple files, and bought some "sticks" of machine steel for making metalworking tools. These I ground and fashioned into suitable tools for carving bone. Bone carving is quite different from wood carving. With bone, you are basically scratching or chipping away the surface. It can be shaved off, but only in very thin layers. It is meticulous, time consuming work, but the payoff is the crisp detail and smooth polished surface that results. Much like carving hardwood such as cherry or good mahogany, no sanding is needed to finish it up. The bone can even buff up to a nice sheen and requires no additional finish

A piece of paper hides the unfinished section
One is always eager to see more progress than he
has actually achieved.

Now it is starting to look like a finished box

At this point, however, there are no pieces on the other end, the back or the lid, so still quite some work to do. Additionally, as already mentioned, in these pictures the bones are just temporarily stuck on with bits of double-sided tape.

In the next post I will show what I did for the lid and the interior of the box; stay tuned.

Videre Scire

12th century Style Wedding Box - Part II

I  had not intended to take so long to continue the narrative of this box, so thank you to all who have been patiently waiting to see more of it. 

 

 

Preparing the box for the intarsia

 

 

 

We left off, in the last post, with the bone border surrounding the intarsia love knot. That seemed like a big "milestone" at the time, but little did I know what infinitesimal progress I had actually made in the scope of the whole project. Since I never made a plan, or drawings, I really had no idea what was going to come out. As I got started, I made several changes to my initial mental idea for the box.

 

I had actually "kicked around" several ideas of how I would make and decorate the box. Some of the ideas were not very ornate, and I even contemplated using some small raised panels made up for another job but were ultimately not needed. At some point, I settled on using some intarsia blanks that I had left from a different project from 2007 or 8. Once I had gotten to this stage, though, there was no more guessing about what I wanted to do, and I had a firm idea and was "on a mission". From this point, it was "full steam ahead" for the next two months!

 

 

Applying the first batch of intarsia, a small step in a long process

 

 

The method for the intarsia that I had used is done by making lots of thin plates of various timbers, gluing them together in layers of alternating colours, then slicing pieces from those blanks and gluing them back together to form patterns. This method is known as "Intarsia Certosina", (named after a region of Italy where it was produced extensively in the 13th and 14th centuries.) Once the pattern has been established, and that might take two, three, or even more stages of cutting and gluing up again, then one is left with a "blank" from which multiple sheets or strips of the same design may be cut.  

 

Some intarsia blanks including the "love Knot" used for this box

 

The process is time consuming, and requires a lot of patience and a need for the utmost precision, as the more "off" one piece is, the more it affects every other piece that is joined to it. I did a big project close to twenty years ago in which I made lots of the stuff, so I had plenty of blanks to choose from. I used one for the front, a second for the ends, and a third for the back; each with a different pattern.

 

laying out the end pattern

 

The process involves slicing the pieces off and then gluing them on with hide glue. The blank for the ends was not quite long enough, so I had to join sections of another strip to make it work. The gluing process was a combination of cramping and using a small hammer to press the pieces into the glue. I tried making a little video to show some of that process, but holding the camera and doing it at the same time is not easy. I think that is best left to the younger generations.

 

 

For the ends, I just cramped a wooden block over the entire end, which made the gluing go a bit faster. I could not do this for the front and back because the bone pieces stood proud of the surface and it would not have been able to lay flat.

 

 

Gluing up. Some blanks in the background

 

With a front and two ends done, it really felt like I was making good progress. It was starting to look like something interesting, as well. Still, at this stage, there was nothing potentially "mediaevel looking about the box. 

 

Front and end all glued up; ready for some borders

 

Once I had the main fields filled in with intarsia, it was time to move on to the next step, which was making a border to go around each face. The border material was made up the same way as the other parts; by gluing together thin strips into a "blank" and then cutting from that.

 

Marking out, cutting and then gluing on the border

 

After the borders were fit on, glued up and everything was dry, it was time to flatten and smooth out the surface. This was done with the cabinet scraper to avoid tearing anything out, which might have happened with a plane.

 

Scraping the face and the final result

 

Once all of the intarsia was finished, the real work was ready to begin; that of making the bone border. When I started, I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but I really enjoyed doing it. That subject, however, is for the next post, as this is already getting too long. Stay tuned...

 

 

 

 

 

 

12th Century Style Wedding Box

A few months ago, one of my very dear clients announced that their daughter was getting married and they asked me to create a keepsake box to present as a wedding gift for the new couple. Having watched the young lady grow up over the last twenty seven years, and given all of the work that I have done for the family over those same years, I was very happy to make something that would be extra spacial for them.

 

 

Centre front detail of the wedding box

 

The only stipulation, other than an idea of the size, that I was given was a suggestion that it should somehow include an inscription with the surname on it. Otherwise, I had free artistic license to do anything I liked as the clients said they knew, "whatever you make will be beautiful."

I was informed that both bride and groom like "archeology", but was not given any specific culture or time period, I did know the couple would be going to Crete for their honeymoon, so my initial thought was to make something with a Minoan theme, as I too have an interest in archeology, especially as it relates to ancient advanced civilisations. However, as I began planning what I would make, I realised that I am a "mediaeval guy" and I should stick with what I know and like the best, so I landed on the 12th century and started working on something.

As with all of my furniture and boxes, this had to be completely hand made, (my own stipulation, not the clients') I chose a plank and started sawing. At this point, I had no clear idea what I would be making, yet.

 

Sawing by hand. (These pictures are taken from videos)

Planing the first face flat

marking the edge of the second to produce parallel faces

planing the second face

"shooting" (squaring up) the ends

Ripping the piece of timber into two halves

We now have two long sides for the box

 

Years ago, I did an intarsia project and had a lot of material left from that; I decided that some of that stuff would be good material to decorate the box with. That part I had decided on, even before I started cutting the timbers, but that was about as far as my planning had gone. I had also decided on the length and width of the inside of the box; the outside dimensions were determined by the timbers that I chose.

It is not well known, and some "histories of furniture" would have you believe very much otherwise, but intarsia work never left the world of furniture ornamentation during the middle ages. It was an art very much practiced by the Romans, and a couple well preserved carbonised examples in Herculaneum prove this to be true. I have seen some old photographs of a now lost (?) 7th century box which was made this way, there are illustrations of the art from 9th century manuscripts, and there is a 10th century multi-leaved wax tablet floating around somewhere, whose outer leaves are thus decorated. This brings us to the 11th and 12 centuries from which there are quite a number of surviving examples of intarsia boxes of German origin

 

 

Video stills showing the making of the centre

Cleaning up the intarsia "love knot" inserted into the fig-wood centre

The centre intarsia, complete and ready for a border

 

 

Nearly twenty years ago, we had a very harsh winter and some fig trees of the grandfather of the bride were killed by that cold. I took a piece of one of the trunks, when it was cut down, because I wanted to see what fig wood looked like. I cut it up as "oyster veneer" (Meaning veneer cut across the trunk of the tree, not with the grain) and it has been lying around my shop, ever since. The grandfather (now deceased) and granddaughter had a very close relationship, so I thought it a fitting gesture to incorporate some of his tree into her wedding box, thus I chose it to go around the "love knot" intarsia.

Once I had established the idea of the material for the box, the question was how to incorporate an inscription into the mix. Somehow, I came up with the idea of using bone, which one often finds paired with wood in mediaeval boxes. I have done several furniture restorations over the years, using bone to replace missing ivory that had been used in the pieces. I still had a couple bones in a drawer so I got one of those out, and it was of a perfect size to do a plate with their surname on it, and that was where it all started. I then had to make another plate for the initials of the couple, and then a couple more were wanted to complete a frame for the intarsia "love knot", again, something that I had made up years ago. 

 

 

 

Preparing to make some flat plates from bone

Cutting the bone (video still)

cutting the plate to width

Beginning the monogram

side pieces to complete the border

 

To be continued. 

The box is finished and has been delivered, but I wanted to keep this project private until after the fact, no pictures of it went on this blog or my Instagram page until after the wedding, because no one knew what I was doing and I wanted to keep it that way. I will post more pictures and more of the story of its making in future posts