David Tilson, Woodworker
Boxes and Small Accessories

Small treasures, and tiny chests to keep them in.

When I started woodworking, my workshop space was a little larger than a four-by-eight foot sheet of plywood. Consequently, the wooden things I made there were correspondingly small, consisting mainly of boxes, puzzles, small carved items, and more boxes. Having mostly plain, inexpensive woods to work with, I quickly learned to embellish my projects with simple carvings and inlay. If you take a look in my web gallery, you’ll see that I still enjoy making small projects that feature carving and inlay work, though the variety of small articles that I now make has increased greatly.  One example of this is the chip carved bolo tie in olivewood, pictured at right.

I enjoy making boxes partly because they are usually a fairly small, relatively simple project that I can "wrap my head around" without too much formal planning and drawing to get in the way, which allows for a certain degree of spontaneity in the project. Another reason I enjoy making boxes is that they fit so well with my preference for making works of functional art; a box is functional, as it is a container meant to hold something, yet it can also be an artwork of its own. Since the box is meant to be opened at some point, it becomes a two-sided kinetic sculpture: I must design how the outside will look, how the inside will look, and how the box will be opened. Plenty of canvas here to keep the artistic mind busy; as the outsides of the boxes become increasingly elaborate and the designs more refined, the challenge is to always ensure that no matter how inviting the outside of the box might appear, what's on the inside is always even better than hoped for.

I’ve made boxes by just about every means I can imagine, from taking a solid wood block and hollowing it out on the bandsaw or lathe or by hand carving it; to building a box the “traditional” way with dovetails, and even by bending wood veneers into an oval shape in the Shaker and Nordic styles. There’s something about a wooden enclosure that always makes me eager to see what’s contained inside. One of my current favorites is the tea box, which is a box or small cabinet that contains a number of smaller, sealed boxes. These smaller boxes are designed to hold tea, keeping it fresh and safe from flavor contamination by other aromatic materials such as coffee or mint herbal teas. One reason I like tea boxes is simply that joy of lifting the lid to peek inside, which is compounded by finding so many more boxes inside, waiting to be explored.