A new woodburning for a poem box: Emily Dickinson for the great, disturbing poem "My Life had Stood- A Loaded Gun." I do think I'm improving at woodburning faces, and doesn't Emily look badass behind that gun? I think she'd probably approve.

Also new- a skeleton mermaid. She's holding a real gray pearl, and I did lots of painstaking wave carving in the wood around her, so it feels really nice as well as looking pretty good.

Fall dates to see us: we'll be at the Shops at La Cantera Art Festival in San Antonio on October 18-20, and the Georgetown Art in the Square festival on Oct 26-27, and the East Austin Studio Tour on November 16-17 and Nov 23-24.

We'll post more dates as those acceptances start to roll in.

A few new boxes in the works- A glass etching for a box top of an X-ray of hands, and  a painted and woodburned illusion skull. I have a thing for woodburning and etching bones- they're just so pretty. I've also been working on woodburning faces (it would be nice to get good enough to do some custom work)- here are a few recent attempts, done from photographs:

I just love e e cummings. Here is a new poem box: woodburned and painted top and base, padauk sides. Yes- I stole that face from a Man Ray photo, although I think my version is decidedly more interesting. I love how the red wood echoes the red of the heart and blood vessels. Tom made some beautiful dovetail joinery for this one. The wood is just beautiful. If you don't know his poems, get a little tipsy and sit down with them. They'll melt your heart.

I have a few more cummings box tops and bases in the works, but below is a picture of the inside and the text of the poem for all you romantics out there.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)                                                       i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Also new: A woodburned  and goldleafed maple top and bottom for the sweet lovely Yeats poem:
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
 But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Ah. Yeats. Y'know, Maud Gonne never loved him back. Maybe he was creepy in real life. I like this girl because, like Maud, she is not treading softly on his dreams. She is striding over them.

My favorite poet is Gerard Manley Hopkins, which might seem like an odd choice for an atheist like me, since he was a monk who wrote almost only about his skydaddy. But damn it, he was a genius and an unparalleled wordsmith. So I have a new series of box tops and bases based on Hopkins poems. Feast your eyes. And for your enjoyment, the particularly beautiful  Hopkins poems they go with: Margaret, Bright wings, and send my roots rain.  All of these are woodburned maple except  the bird/phoenix, which is goldleafed walnut.

And here is our latest story box: Baba Yaga is a Russian folktale figure- a really scary witch who steals children, flies around in a mortar (I guess steering with the pestle), and lives in a house on chicken legs in a forest surrounded by skulls on pikes. The maple top of this box shows a hut on chicken legs strolling through a moonlit forest. It's woodburned, painted, and has a goldleafed moon. The inside shows a silhouette of Baba Yaga flying in her mortar.
I suppose Russian parents threaten bad children with Baba Yaga.  Better or worse than terrifying little people with hell and the devil?

Here's what Tom gets up to when unsupervised- an absolutely gorgeous shaped rosewood box with a bird's eye maple top and a lovely weird lid lift of maple and rosewood shaped like an egg? or a geode? and cut in half. It's also hinged, which happens rarely in our woodshop. He did most of this while I was hanging out with my girlpack in NYC, so I couldn't interfere and talk him into a different direction. Which is fortunate, because this box is really lovely.