Christmas Gift Boxes

My wife has recently fallen in love with decorative and specialty soaps that she has found on Etsy. She has ordered a BUNCH of them to give as Christmas gifts this year. She asked me to build some boxes that she could use to hold all of the various soaps for her mother and sisters in law.

I recently discovered that I really like the look of birch plywood and walnut together. I finish them both with BLO. I built a dedicated 45’ miter sled for my table saw, and I used that to cut miters for the boxes. I also incorporated walnut splines. This was my first time to use splines. I really like the look.

Using my router table, I cut a dado in the walnut banding so that the 1/2” ply would slide in to it. There is an 1/8” overhang on either side of the plywood. I also used the router table to cut a rabbet on the bottom of each piece of ply to accept the bottoms.

Gluing up the mitered corners of the boxes took some creativity and a LOT of clamps.

My wife was very happy with the finished boxes.

Thanks for looking!

-- Why can’t I ever find my pencil???