Whenever I’m at Hobby Lobby, I take a walk through the wooden box section and see if anything really catches my eye.  I personally have no woodworking skills or experience, but my father was a magician when it comes to wood stuff, and I’ve seen lots of other people do some pretty amazing things from plain beginnings.  A couple of months ago, I found a wooden hinged box that I somehow imagined I could make into a decent looking dice box.  So, with my brother’s graduation and cousin’s birthday upcoming, I thought I would give it a shot.

A couple of pictures of the finished products after the jump.

For this project, I knew I wanted to stain the wood and give it the shiny finish of polyurethane, so I looked for a stain that I wanted, and picked up prestain, stain, and semi-gloss polyurethane from the home depot.  Then, to line the insides, I grabbed appropriate colors of felt and a hot glue gun for attaching them to the box.  The casino dice, I picked up online, while the Warmachine custom dice were assembled from some blank dice I bought online, painted with spray paint, and covered with laminated label paper printed with the various symbols (I already gave Ian his set of custom dice, which is why they aren’t included in this picture).  The icons on the top were simply printed with my 3D printer using the tech I’d already built up for doing this sort of thing, with the main novelty being that I switched colors half-way through the print so that I didn’t have to do any painting.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.  While I’m certainly no woodworker (nor would I expect to be after my first project!), it was fun to give it a try and see what I could produce.  I’m not sure whether I’ll continue to try to refine this type of project, or leave the woodworking to those other wood-magicians, but for now, I’m throwing my focus on towards other things.