Theme Thursday - Box

Some handcrafted boxes hanging around my place.

Two boxes made with Fimo™, a polymer clay you can bake in your oven at 180ºF (82ºC) to harden. I play with Fimo™ from time to time, mostly making beads and stuff, but lots of people make things like this with it, so I tried it out about 10 years or so ago. I like how they turned out.

The case for my alto recorder, made from a Royal Jamaica #10 Downing Street cigar box. I can't leave things alone. The recorder came in a really boring gray cardboard box, and I just couldn't deal with that, so I found this gorgeous cedar cigar box and used acrylic paints to put some Hopi designs on it.

Another cedar cigar box drafted to serve alternative duty. This is the box I keep my Soulcards™ in. I glued the original box cover for the cards on the lid and created the raised designs with wood glues, painted everything a deep burgundy, and then applied synthetic gold leaf over it all and rubbed very hard so the red would show through somewhat. Heh, heh! I did warn you that I just can't leave things alone!

I decided to carry that idea of handcrafted creativity on to the videos for this week. I'd already found a clip of the "This Is My Box" aria from Amahl and the Night Visitors and another of the Grateful Dead singing "Box of Rain" when an idea occurred to me - antique music boxes. And I found some beauties! This first is a German Polyphon-Musikwerke AG music box, one of the world's premier companies making gear-driven disc music boxes in the 19th Century. This one is playing a 17 inch disc of "Heimliche Liebe":

Another Polyphon box playing "Tagwacht":

This last one has my friend Willow written all over it. This is the ultimate piece of Victoriana - a 27-inch Regina changer music box (the 19th Century version of a jukebox) playing "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls". Willow, the minute I saw what tune this one played, I knew I had to post it for you to see. Enjoy!

Photos & text © 2010 by A. Roy Hilbinger