Butterfly Bandsaw Box

My granddaughter's fifth birthday was a couple of years ago and I wanted to make her something special. Her and her mom were talking about how she's collected lots of little jewelry and she really needed a jewelry box to keep the "good" jewelry separate from the "play" jewelry.

So, I started looking around at jewelry boxes that were the right mix of fun and grown-up for a 5-year-old who thinks she's 15 ;-) I stumbled on several butterfly shaped bandsaw boxes and decided to run with the idea.

About 3 years ago, LJ AZWoody did some Fun Lumber Quizzes where he showed pics of some AZ native woods he had processed on his sawmill and whoever guessed the species correctly first got the sample piece. It was very generous and I won the one linked above. BTW, y'all check out the unique woods Charles has at Sonora Woodworks!

So ever since 2016, I've had this nice hunk of Blue Gum Eucalyptus squirreled away looking for the perfect project.

So I went to work with handplanes and squared it up and sketched my design onto it. I have done some bandsaw boxes in the past and it always takes me 3 or 4 blade changes to get it done. So I decided this time that I would use my resaw blade to cut the back off before I cut it to shape. Then I taped the back on with carpet tape before sawing to shape.

The plan was to then remove the back before I cut out all the drawers. Everything went according to plan. Until I forgot to remove the back before cutting out the drawers…

Oops. Well, it gave me the opportunity to improvise a bit. Instead of using a solid back as I had intended, I decided I would use some of the Maple I was going to use for the drawer fronts and make the back look more like the front. So I cut some pieces just slightly larger than the cavities for the drawers and shaped them on my belt grinder and glued them over the holes. Then I used some Olive to make the pieces of the body and glued them in the center to cover up most of the kerfs from the drawer cavities.

Finally, I used the Maple to make the drawer fronts and glued everything back together. The drawer cavities in the box as well as the inside of the drawers was flocked with Wine flocking which ended up matching the Eucalyptus almost perfectly.

Finish was just two coats of BLO on everything. It really brought out the color of the Eucalyptus and highlighted some curl in the Maple.

The customer was very satisfied :-)

Thanks for looking! Questions and comments welcomed as always.