u/MOSTLY-HARMLESS-NOW

Box one — sculpted maple handle. The lid is a single quartersawn walnut panel.

That width is the part that still gets me every time I open the planer. Modern furniture-grade walnut runs 6 to 10 inches wide at the lumber yard. An 18-inch quartersawn board needs a log over three feet across, and trees that size haven't been routinely milled since the original old-growth stands got cut. Quartersawing wastes even more of the log than flat-sawing does, so commercial mills only produce wide quartersawn on commission, and not at this width. These panels were probably already effectively irreplaceable when my dad set them aside in the 1960s. Sixty years later they're not on the open market at any price.

Ribbon-stripe figure of the quartersawn lid, with the maple splines visible at the corner. Box two.

So when we cleaned out my dad's shop, I rescued the boards. Three jewelry boxes — one each for my wife and two of my three daughters. The tops of one-piece school desks, salvaged 60 years ago and squirreled away in his shop.

Mitered corners with maple splines cut in after glue-up. Brass-rod pivot hinges — clamped the lid to the box and drilled through both on the drill press, then tapped a brass rod in each side. No traditional hinges.

Box one - (open, hinge hidden)

Interior trays are maple with zebrawood bottoms.

Detail of interior trays, box two.

Tray detail — maple walls, zebrawood bottom. Same mitered construction as the box itself.

Finish is six layers of urethane thinned with mineral spirits, wet-sanded 150 → 180 → 220 → 300 → 400 → 600.

Each got a different handle for the recipient — a sculpted maple curve, a carved cherry maple leaf, and a maple starfish.

Box two — cherry maple leaf, carved in relief.

Starfish handle

Box three — maple starfish.

I have three daughters though, so one lost out. That's another post.

Walnut andon lamps with kumiko panels — bedside-table version and a 24" floor version.

Sharing this because it's a hybrid workflow — power tools for stock prep, hand tools for the kumiko itself. The jigs and pattern guidance are straight from The Art of Kumiko (recommended if you don't already have it).

Kumiko Jigs

Stock prep (power tools)

Walnut started as rough lumber. Table saw to rip down to strips, cross-cut sled for to make the grids. No way around this in a modern shop — ripping walnut to 6mm strips with a hand saw isn't realistic and isn't what makes kumiko kumiko anyway. (Yes, yes — every real Japanese woodworker, rough-cuts trees to 2x4s with a ryoba, hand-planes them square, and smelts the iron for his plane from ore he mined himself. I'm not that woodworker.)

Kumiko work (hand tools)

This is where the craft lives. Two different patterns across the two lamps:

- Bedside lamp: kikkō-nishiki — the stretched hex pattern visible in the panel photo. Mitre jigs at 22.5° and 67.5° (complementary cuts on each piece).

kikkō-nishiki panel in progress

- Floor lamp: the pattern is called "mitre-square" in The Art of Kumiko — built off 45° jigs. The book gives only the descriptive English name. If anyone here knows the proper Japanese name for this pattern, I'd appreciate the learning.

finished floor lamp showing the mitre-square pattern

Each piece gets:

1. Roughly cut to length with a dozuki — most forgiving for repeated short cuts
2. The mitre angle established in the appropriate jig
3. Paring with a chisel for the final fit

chisel paring detail with jig

The paring step is the actual time sink. Each piece has to slot perfectly into the lattice with no light visible at the joint. Note that the jig has a built-in stop that helps, and was unfortunately too wide for this project, hence the little color wood wedges.

Finishing

Glued up the kumiko inside each lamp frame, then mulberry paper for the shades (Korean, not Japanese — easier to source in the US). Both lamps sit on routed walnut bases.

finished bedside lamp

finished floor lamp

BTW, what's the proper Japanese name for the "mitre-square" pattern? The Art of Kumiko only gave me the English translation.

A few years back I was visiting a friend in Gloucester (MA) who had cut down a tree for a neighbor and dragged all the logs back to his shed. A sawyer friend of his had cut them into 6' × 4" × 6" baulks, stickered them, and let them air-dry in the shed for two years. While I was there I noticed the cut ends and started drooling — walnut. He brought a few baulks down. I sawed them into 1" slabs back home, restickered them, and clamped them in front of a space heater on my workbench for another three months to get the moisture content down for indoor use.

Slabs after 2 years stickered in a Gloucester shed, clamped at home for another 3 months

Once they were stable, I started building andon lamps with kumiko panels, following the article in Fine Woodworking #295 (Mar/Apr 2022 — link).

When I first dragged the slabs home I joked to my friend that I was going to turn his neighbour's walnut into matchsticks. Turns out kumiko is tiny matchsticks, so I was technically telling the truth.

The design in the article was too big for a bedside lamp, so I downsized the frame and redesigned the panels with a kikkō-nishiki (tortoise-shell) pattern to fit the smaller proportions. I played around with full size drawing (see below for one version) before settling on a final version.

Modified kikkō-nishiki pattern, sized for a bedside lamp

Kumiko panel in clamps

Bedside lamp glue-up

Bedside lamp, finished

I liked the result enough to build a floor lamp version next — but the kikkō-nishiki pattern wasn't going to look right at that scale. It reads horizontally; a floor lamp is vertical. For the central band I switched to a modified miter-square pattern (I don't know the Japanese name for this one — would love to hear it if anyone does), which feels like it works with the longer body.

Floor lamp with miter-square central band

The walnut from Gloucester ended up in both lamps. Worth the wait.