Lois Keneer Ventura is a seasoned veteran when it comes to breaking into male-dominated activities. Growing up as the only girl of seven children, she found herself constantly having to do everything better than her brothers if she wanted to play with them. But when she started doing everything better, they didn't want to play with her anymore, or they didn't want to play fairly. It's amazing that Lois still has such a strong attraction to wood after being locked up in the cedar chest countless times by her brothers while playing hide-and-seek.

Fortunately, not all the men in her life were as taxing on her emotional reserves. She watched her father and grandfather work with wood while she was growing up, and in admiring their creations, found herself naturally drawn to wood. Her grandfather was a particular source of inspiration. He built his own log home in the 1950s, and to decorate it, would search the forest for odd wood shapes that he would turn into wall hangings and sconces. Lois was attracted to the natural shapes and textures of these pieces, and today, many of her grandfather's ideas go into her boxes.

She started her self-directed woodworking education 20 years ago, and dabbled in furniture, scrollwork, and intarsia as hobbies while she worked various odd jobs. Although she tried a few night woodworking courses out of curiosity, most of her woodworking education she found in books. When asked how she feels about people who look down on self-taught artists, she answers objectively: having participated in numerous art shows she has seen the pendulum swing both ways. She's seen projects by many artists with superior education who lack the talent and creativity to translate that training into superior artwork. On the opposite hand, she has become successful simply by teaching herself.

Lois decided to make woodworking her part-time job in 1985. In 1992, after growing tired of jobs where she wasn't paid what she was worth, Lois decided to quit the mainstream world to take up woodworking full-time.

Her decision to make woodworking her career meant that she would once again have to prove herself in a male-dominated pursuit. To do this, she decided to view her work as a product of novelty rather than of minority, an attitude that helped her break into a male-dominated profession with few problems. She does still encounter ignorance in men who assume that she only does the measuring and sanding for Knothome Designs, the woodworking business she and her husband, Peter, established to sell their original designs. Generally, she finds that many male woodworking professionals are intimidated by their female peers, a fact that she advises women to use to their advantage. She adds that there's no need to be arrogant, since the men are already scared of you, but adds that you shouldn't have to sit through hours of unwanted advice from men who assume that they know more about woodworking than you do.

And Lois knows woodworking. She has been focusing her design efforts solely on bandsawn boxes for the past seven years, producing over 500 individual pieces. She sells the boxes through Knothome Designs or displays them at juried art shows all over the eastern United States. She has won countless awards; the most recent include the Festival Award at the Three Resorts Festival in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the Designer's Craftsman Award for Excellence at the Canton Museum, in Canton, Ohio; and another top award at Cincinnati's Summer Art Show.

When asked what keeps her going, Lois jokingly suggests credit card debt. While she loves the freedom self-employment offers, she adds that "craziness" comes with doing woodworking for a living. Artists must be painstaking in their efforts, but for little compensation. Lois often finds this frustrating. To make a reasonable living as a woodworker, she would have to concentrate her efforts on mass-produced, high-demand, lower-quality, "stapled-together" items like cabinets and furniture that leave little room for her artistic sensibilities.

Is all the "craziness" worth it? Lois says yes. Her gratification comes from expressing herself through designing and completing a project, applying the first coat of oil to it, and stepping back in admiration. And we all know there's no craziness in that.

When Women in Woodworking's graphic designer, Kris, brought a copy of Lois Keneer Ventura's Building Beautiful Boxes with Your Bandsaw to the development table, I was instantly intrigued. To grasp the idea of devoting all your woodworking hours to one type of project, while still being able to make each piece an individual work of art, I simply had to ask, "Why bandsawn boxes?"

First, Lois wanted a unique woodworking creation to display at juried art shows and contests, where artists must create all their pieces from their own original designs, rather than from someone else's patterns. But she also wanted a design that would allow her greater artistic expression than she could achieve through standard woodworking practices. "I don't like measuring," she revealed. With bandsawn boxes, she found that the exact measurements required were only for the basic length, depth, and width. Once on the bandsaw a box "takes on a life of its own."

She created her first box in 1993. It sits atop a bookshelf in the Ventura home, and after glancing at it during our conversation, Lois commented that it seemed crude to her in terms of technique, with rather tight spots in the design that were very difficult to sand and chisel. Still, the box became a great learning tool in the end, and all the problems she ran into trying to construct it helped her refine her design strategies, evidenced in the following pieces, a sampler of Lois's favorites.

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.

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.

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.

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.