Still from my Japanese 'period' of woodwork, and following on from the small chest/ kodansu shown earlier, this small box is also related to the Japanese art of appreciating incense - Kōdō. Whereas a kodansu was used to store a range items related to Kōdō, a Kobako is used to store the actual incense.
It appears to be two boxes fused together. It is made from woody pear and cherry with an ebony string around the top and decoration using sprinkled gold dust and pau shell.
The pau shell mosaic was cut from a laminated sheet with the pieces 'glued' onto wet polyurethane. Many more coats of polyurethane were then added to build a surface that was almost level with the shell. The gold dust patterns were then produced using masking tape.
The unmasked areas were coated with polyurethane varnish and the gold dust sprinkled on to the wet varnish. The masking tape is then removed and once dry another 7 or 8 coats of poly are applied to build up a flat surface that can be polished through to the shell without removing the gold dust. I polish using wet and dry paper 800 - 4000 finishing off with a polishing powder.
The inside of the box also has a gold dust sprinkled finish.
Thanks as ever Steve - Check out this link of mine on Pinterest for different shaped Japanese boxes, - box-on-box. It's also got box-in-boxes, that you mentioned in an earlier comment. There are some mind boggling ideas, but at least I kept to the simple ones - ones with straight sides!.
