I was fortunate to snag a sample of the new finished Ebony leather from Glowforge and decided to make one of my triangular boxes with it.
My photography is lousy—you can’t really see how nice the leather is, but trust me, it’s nice. The piece I used was the Thick variety, and it pairs pretty well with maple ply for standard finger joints.
In case you are wondering about the center “stone,” I custom made it out of resin by creating a mold using Thick acrylic, a piece of tooling pewter, a paper stump, and a mold-making silicone kit.
Basically, you clamp the pewter to the acrylic cutout then rub the pewter with the stump until it has formed the domed shape. Then hot glue the pewter piece to the bottom of a small paper box, mix the two-part molding silicone, pour and cure. I mixed up some casting resin, tinted it and added gold leaf, and cast it into the mold. After it cured I polished it up and scanned it to a shape which I engraved into the box lid, then adhered the resin piece. I had to polish it with Novus plastic polish; if I had thought to polish the metal before making the mold, I might not have needed to polish the resin.
