Another small box used as part of Japanese Kōdō - the incense ceremony. It is for storing the small packets of incense used in the ceremony.
It appears to be three boxes fused together. It is made from Woody Pear, Maple, and Walnut, with veneered 'lids' on three different levels, and rock maple stringing around the edges of the lids. The corner joints are simple mitres with laminated veneer splines.
I've experimented with the use of eggshell on one of the lids, and gold leaf on the others.
The eggshell, is used inside up. The pieces are stuck onto wet polyurethane and positioned using tweezers and then a pin in the end of a piece of dowel for fine 'tuning'. In some cases, the pin was also used to crack the small bits of shell into even smaller pieces once it was in the polyurethane. You have to remove the internal membrane of the eggshell by soaking in warm water and peeling it off. You then let it dry before breaking it up and using it.
For the lids with the gold leaf designs, I first finished them with several coats of polyurethane to get a solid flat finished surface. Masking tape was then used to produce the design. Gold size was applied to the unmasked parts of the lids and the gold leaf was stuck on. Unfortunately, I did not achieve the crisp edges to the gold leaf that I wanted.
With the eggshell and gold leaf applied many more coats of polyurethane were applied to build up a surface that covered the eggshell and gold leaf. It was then sanded flat with wet and dry paper 800-2000 and then polished with a polishing compound.
I really like the eggshell idea and will look to use it again. The use of slightly different sized 'bits' for the different parts of the mosaic worked well. Perhaps mixing the inside white of the shell, with the brown of the outside, or even using duck egg shell, which is slightly blue, are other possibilities. But I need to do a bit more research on applying the gold leaf, while it looks OK I really wanted nice crisp edges.
