The Salado Art Fair is this weekend- and the temperature will be in the 60s! Beautiful weather for an art fair, so come out and see us and all the other artists at Salado: Sat 27 (9 to 6) and Sun 28  (10 to 5). Many of the boxes for sale on this website will be with us at Salado, and it's a great time to meet with us about customizing boxes.

Also- the East Austin Studio Tour is Nov 10/11 and Nov 17/18. See their website for info. The kick-off party is next Saturday (11/3) at 2000 E. 6th Street (next to the Post Office); it will showcase art from over 200 artists participating in the tour. It's $30 to attend, and the proceeds go to EAST. The box in the picture is at the show and is for sale. Buy it there and 25% of the proceeds go to support EAST instead of going to buying kiwis for our spoiled parrot. It's etched glass, bird's eye maple box, maple, wenge, and purpleheart base, and abalone lid lift.

We've incorporated glass into many boxes, and recently we're starting to make boxes with two glass sides and 2 wood sides, like this now-finished (and for sale on our "Wood and Glass Boxes" pages) Parakeet Cage Box. It's a challenge to cut and grind glass perfectly so it will fit into  the wood pieces, and the bars were challenging on this one. But I do love the juxtaposition of the birds on either side facing in opposite ways. This box is just beautiful with light behind it. The sides are canarywood and the top and base are purpleheart. We used an old metal handle for a lid lift. I suppose we should have lined the base with newspaper.

Tom wanted to do an aquarium box like this, so I etched these two glass panels with aquarium fish and plants, and they look pretty cool facing each other- it's busy like a real fish tank, and there's lots of detail on all the fish. It seems like this one should be lit inside. I hate it when decorative lights like this need to plug in, though- I think it ruins the effect, so I've been investigating LED mini light kits that are battery-powered so you could place this, say, in the middle of a table without having an ugly cord attached. It will be another engineering challenge to figure out how to place cords and lights and batteries and switches in the wood so it's all hidden. If anybody out there has ideas on good kits or ways to do this more easily, shoot us an email.

I also etched these panels with winter trees for another box with two glass sides. I think it might look good to use light wood for the other two sides and continue the tree design onto the wood by woodburning so it's winter trees all around.

And don't ask us why we make boxes that you can see through, which makes it hard to put things in them. We like making boxes, OK? Boxes are beautiful whether there's something in them or not. There's something about the possibility of opening it up and putting something in it that is satisfying. I sort of collect boxes, and I inherited my grandmother's wonderful antique pillbox collection (which I can't afford to add to), and most of them are empty, and I don't think that's weird. So there.

Parakeets are joyous creatures- they're always so damned busy and sunny, and I love their sounds. I've had several over the course of my life, and they've always been wild type green males. I guess I like the mutant colors, but I've always been a sucker for that fresh, spring green stomach and black and yellow patterned back. My childhood guy, Tweety (I was a kid when I named him, OK?) died when I was a junior in high school. He was an awesome bird, tame and funny. Later, I got one, Oliver, whom my mother stole from me because she loved him so much. He liked to bathe in wine glasses (with water in them!) and swing on the cords of the blinds. When he died, my mother swore she'd never have another bird, but she's  reconsidering now. Some years ago, we got our first defective parakeet, Jeff, who was the first unpleasant parakeet I'd ever met. We hated him and he hated us, and when our dog ate him we were mostly just mad at the dog (who is now well-trained to avoid household birds). Now, we have Pico ( in picture), who is in the process of becoming tame, but who still mostly feels revolted by us. We got him as a pet for our parrot, but she tried to eat him, so now he's our pet. He'll come out and eat from our hands, but we can tell he still feels like we're just gross and he'd rather have no truck with us. Sometimes taming a bird is a slow process.

So we are making a parakeet cage box to memorialize our love for these little creatures. I etched the keets onto two pieces of glass, and Tom is building this canarywood (seemed appropriate) and purpleheart box for it. There was a bit of difficulty engineering it to have bars, but it is turning out to be lovely. The top will have a cage-like handle for a lift. Parakeet lovers- it will soon be for sale!
We like this look so much that we're going to make an aquarium box the same way (but obviously without bars), and I also think this would be a good look for a "forest" box- with trees etched onto glass and maybe woodburned onto two wood sides. We'll see if this pans out.
And right now my parrot is being SUCH a sweet girl- a rarity. She's rubbing her head underneath my chin and cooing to me. Perhaps we'll do a parrot box, too.

This was my dog Molly, who died of a mast cell cancer two years ago. I got Molly because my most beloved dog Carlo was getting old, and I was succession planning. I knew that when Carlo died, I would never get out of bed unless I had another dog to feed and care for- the Plan B dog. So I went to the Pound to find Plan B. Molly was the saddest dog at the Pound. She was lying in a puddle of urine and had just given up. She wasn't selling herself or responding to overtures from anyone. The Pound workers said she was medically OK, but just heartbroken and waiting to die. So I took her home, and in 2 days she was a bouncy, obnoxious, completely submissive dog. She was always a second-class citizen in our house- Carlo was always everyone's favorite and Molly lived in her shadow.  And poor Mo was abused badly by our lovebird, Humper (see picture below). When Carlo died, she fulfilled her function- I had to get up and feed her and love her, and she helped me be OK.

And then she got cancer and died only a few years after Carlo. We decided to put her down before she got really sick, which the vet said was only days away after the chemo failed (yes, we did dog chemotherapy. We're those people). She was days or weeks from an agonizing painful death from an angry mast cell tumor. So we had Dr. Death come to the house to do it. And Molly ran to the door wagging to greet him, and that felt awful. We had waited too long to put Carlo down, and she was miserable and scared and hurting, and we didn't want to do that to the Mo. But it was terrible- one minute she was a dancing happy dog and the next she was dead. And she had become so much more than Plan B. She was my sweet girl and I miss her. We made a box for her ashes, and it's on the mantel with our other dogs.

The Octobox! This one was tough- but worth it, I think. We attached the bottom legs (carving and sanding all those tentacles was a LOT of work) and the side tentacles, and then thought it needed a base for stability, so added a spalted pecan base to match the top, which is really lovely. It turned out even better than I thought it would, and I thought it would be pretty great. I'd love to put this one in the East Austin Studio Tour gallery show, but it is one inch too tall and wide to meet their small size criteria. The box and tentacles are grenadillo, base and top are spalted pecan (with some turquoise inlay in the top, and a bone lid lift.

And I've been away from carving boxes for a while (too busy playing with glass), but I had a gorgeous piece of spalted maple with some pink streaks running through it, and it felt like time to pick up my mallet and chisel again. I  shaped it into this teardrop-like figure, and filled all the natural little worm holes with turquoise. It's on a base of spalted maple. I know it's easier to get symmetrical round shapes with a lathe, but I can't seem to like lathe work. It's not as satisfying as whacking at wood with a mallet until a shape emerges, and the imperfect symmetry is sometimes really quirky and pleasing in the carved boxes. It's all coming together like it always seems to do- it's just hard to remember that when you're looking at a beautiful solid block of unique wood and thinking, "all I can do is eff this up."
I also thought it needed some texture, so I studded the base with agate beads with some blue in them to bring out the turquoise (they're still rough, as you can see).  I definitely like this effect. It will get a colored glass top to highlight the pink in the wood and the turquoise. 

I mentioned Humper, our long-gone lovebird, in my last post. Humper was the tamest bird in existence. He loved people, and especially loved to crawl in women's shirts and perch on their bras, poking his head up occasionally above the neckline. He came when called and had a lot of freedom, and would have died being caged all the time (we actually had to put a real lock on the cage door, since he could figure out how to open all hasps and click locks).  And oh, did he love to get in bed with Tom, snuggle in, and go to sleep with him. (This is my favorite photo I ever took)

But Humper hated our dogs and would try to kill them and intimidate them. He only weighed a few ounces, but he was a mighty force of nature. He would get in their food bowls and chase them away. He'd wiggle under doors to get at them. He'd fly onto them and ride them. He'd drive them into the kennel and refuse to let them out. Here is a picture of our dear old dog Brittany being cornered. The dogs were good girls, but sooner or later, one of them was going to fight back, so our options were to cage the Hump (if you're wondering about the name, think about it a sec. Yep.), or to find him a new home. We found him a new home, and although it was great for him, it felt awful- I had never gotten rid of a pet before, and I loved Humper. But he just couldn't live with dogs.

Then Carlo died, and we had one box on the mantel (see last post for this sob story). Then Molly died two years ago, and we had two. Our beloved Britt went last year, and we are now three boxes old (here is Britt's box- it has a light blue marble set in the top because that was the color of her eyes). We have  two young dogs now, and sometimes I wonder why I am so foolish as to keep getting attached to dogs. And our parrot, while a cranky jerk, isn't at all interested in the dogs (a great relief). Anyone who doesn't routinely give her nuts is not worthy of her attention. Hopefully she will outlive us and we'll never have to make a tiny box for parrot ashes.

And here's a new box that would make a gorgeous cremation box. It's rosewood with a beautiful purplish metal lid lift (I'll have to see if I can identify the metal). If you're looking for something urn-like, but with some flair, this is a great choice. It's now for sale under "Constructed Boxes."

And to be completely random: don't forget, folks, the new season of The Walking Dead begins IN LESS THAN TWO WEEKS! Now THAT'S a happy note to end this post on.