In The Vernal Equibox "new life celebrates
the first sunrise of
spring."; Lois designed this six-drawer "box" to symbolize a germinating
plant or a shapely tree. The design combines walnut in free-form with the only
piece of worm-streaked maple that Lois has ever seen.
| Creative
Names for Creative Projects
Lois is fond of thinking of creative names
like The Vernal Equibox for her pieces. And rightly so, given the creativity
that goes into making them. Lois
begins her work on each piece by selecting the type of wood she wants to use.
While she credits her grandfather -- who would search the forest to find wood
for his pieces -- as a source of inspiration for her boxes, she can't go outside
the lumberyard to get her stock like he did. At one time she was able to, but
once she focused all her efforts into bandsawn boxes, she found that she had to
use kiln-dried lumber. Wood that is dried naturally never gets dry enough: any
leftover moisture makes the wood split on the bandsaw. Finding
the Right Wood Luckily,
she lives in an area with many sawmills and can get plenty of board feet of her
favorite types of wood. These include birdseye maple and walnut, both of which
appear in this piece, Phoenix. She'll spend several hours hand selecting
rough-sawn, four-quarter stock, paying special attention to the grain and color
and how both will appear in the finished piece.
Phoenix
| Lois
refuses to use exotic wood to create her boxes. Instead, she'd prefer to do her
part to help preserve the environment by creating from the more abundant species
in her area. But common stock doesn't result in common pieces. Instead, she works
the wood into wonderful designs with unique meanings. Phoenix is named for the
mythical figure that is reborn from its own fire and ash; to her the piece symbolizes
renewal and the heralding of the dawn of a new age. Making
the Boxes
Tsunami,
Lois's birdseye maple version of the ancient Japanese coastal monuments that warn
of the huge tidal waves produced by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. This is
a favorite among Lois's admirers. The unique heart streaks through the stock are
what make this version of the often-produced design a particular favorite of Lois's.
Tsunami
| Lois
begins each box by planing the rough-sawn, four-quarter, kiln-dried wood, and
then resawing it. She then joints to produce one piece, approximately 5' to 6'
long and 5" to 6" wide. Lois joints the pieces for the same reason she
only uses kiln-dried lumber: if she tried to produce a design from one solid block
of wood, the wood would split, an event that Lois is careful to avoid. After
she sands the wood to the proper thickness, measures, cuts, and glues it, Lois
applies lamination to the wood with bookmatching technique to bring out the natural
patterns. After
laminating, the box parts and details are ready to be cut out with the bandsaw.
And then comes the most painstaking part of the process: obtaining perfect shape
and smoothness through hours of machine-sanding, hand-sanding, and chiseling.
Nowadays, Lois makes sure that her designs allow easy access to all nooks and
crannies, a lesson learned from difficulties she encountered when making her first
box. It
can take Lois anywhere from 12 to 50 hours to complete one box. The time depends
on the design, the number of drawers, the number of tight areas that need to be
shaped, and so on. While Lois relies on some assembly line tactics to make her
boxes, such as planing or resawing a number of boards at once, she bandsaws and
shapes each box individually, which results in unique variations of the same design.
Aurora
| While
many have asked for larger pieces, Lois keeps the boxes small. Because of the
technique she uses, in which the box is essentially sculpted out of the wood,
large pieces such as hutches and dressers would be nearly impossible to move because
of their weight. In
general, Lois prefers not to dabble with new designs requested by customers, no
matter how big or small. Instead, she tends to stick to a specific product line
of her own designs, to which she adds new designs to from time to time. Despite
the focus on specific designs, each individual box has unique characteristics
resulting from the the wood used to create it. One
Product, Many Results
"Solar winds ruffle luminous curtains of
magnetic activity in Earth's ionosphere" in this example of Aurora,
one of Lois's designs named for the Goddess of the Dawn. The four-drawer box combines
birdseye maple drawer pulls with an interesting piece of poplar Lois found in
her lumberyard searches. When Lois applied a linseed oil/plant resin finish, an
import from Germany, to the heartwood, it turned very dark in some places, and
very colorful in others: traces of pink, white, purple, olive green, and black
all appear in this piece, each accented by the linseed/resin finish, which Lois
buffed to achieve a soft, satin-like appearance. <<<
Back to beginning of the article | 
