I don’t want this post to sound morbid, but . . .  I was proud of my woodworking and thought I would show off one of my urns.

When I bought this house, the front yard had one tree; growing from the middle of the lawn, but obscuring my front porch view of the powerlines that run along the north property line.  It was a Mountain Ash.  Mountain Ash trees produce loads of red berries that cluster all over the tree.  The fruit soften and ferment during the fall and provide food for birds during the winter.  Well, food laced with alcohol.  It made the birds drunk, and loads of them would fly into my picture window on the front of the house.

Unbeknownst to me, trees have life expectancies, and this one was reaching the end of its.  Over the course of a couple of years, large branches died, and eventually the tree exhaled its last oxygen.  The trunk of the tree was rather substantial and so I asked a local miller if he would resaw the trunk into half inch thick planks.  I wasn’t sure if Mountain Ash could be used for woodworking, but it was worth a go.  I thought pieces of that size could be used to make boxes and half inch thickness seemed appropriate.

I painted the ends of the planks with white paint to guide the drying process.  I stacked them in my shop and forgot about them.  That was over twenty years ago.

When my dogs passed away, I had them cremated, and the ashes were returned to me in sealed plastic containers.  They were nice enough, but they were plastic.  I had always intended to enclose the plastic containers in urns made from wood.  A serious upgrade.  I also thought that making the boxes from wood that lived and died on this property, like the dogs, was perfect for making their urns.  The years passed, but this winter I decided it was time to make good on my intentions.

Pictured above is one of those urns.  This one is for Kronos.  As you can see, the wood grain is spectacular, and the wood itself was very nice to work with.  Each urn had the same basic construction, but the columns that run up the corners are different for each dog.  For Kronos, I used smaller pieces of the ash to create quoins running up each corner of the box.  I think it turned out great.