Memory box for Hannah

I built this for my sister-in-law and her husband as a gift after the birth of their first child, Hannah. I wanted to try some things that I hadn’t done yet and also to make something beautiful and sturdy for them. This was my first experience working with cherry, doing inlay, making wooden hinges and using keyed miter joints. The top is chechen and maple, the hinges are chechen with maple plugs to cover the the screws. The sides are cherry with chechen inlay in the front and maple keys. The base is luauan ply. The finish is Danish oil.
Making the hinges was fun but frustrating as my attempted use of a roundover bit to generate the curve did more harm than good (I ended up using a sander and a lot of time to make the curves). The inlay went relatively smoothly (this was my first experience using a plunge router and despite my clamping edge guide, I was not able to route the channels perfectly straight). I would have liked to make bigger keys (or more keys) for the corners, but I decided it would distract from the top and the “H” inlay too much. So I left the two understated keys on each corner. It is interesting to note how much difference the use of the flash makes in the apperance of the cherry. All of the pictures were taken with pretty much the same light (CFLs in my shop) but the flash really washes out the cherry. Without the flash the color of the cherry turns out a lot truer.

-- A bad craftsmen blames his cheap #$%ing tools