Tea box in sweet gum

Small tea storage box made from rescued urban sweetgum lumber showing clean full-blind dovetail construction and natural wood grain — Small Tea box

In the interest to try full blind dovetails, I decided to make a small box to house some tea packets in a 3 by 1 arrangement. I used a piece of sweetgum rescued from the local municipal dump pile for urban logs.

It seems that most of the logs were destined for firewood. However as the wood looked interesting, I decided to quarter the log and let it dry a bit before slicing into 5/4 planks on the bandsaw. In terms of working, it seemed similar to cherry but didn’t quite have the chatoyance of cherry when you oil it.

Quartered sweetgum log sections with bark before stripping and drying for six months, rescued from municipal urban lumber pile — Quartered sweetgum before stripping the bark and drying for 6 months.

Also decided to try some chip carving to annotate the lid. Finish was shellac.

Tea box lid detail showing decorative chip carving pattern on sweetgum wood with shellac finish — Some chip carving