practical gifts, and a slight escalation

Some projects start with a clear purpose. Others start with a vague idea and grow from there. These ones were somewhere in between.

a clock (that isn’t meant to be noticed)

The room I use for private client work had one small but persistent issue: no clock. Not a major problem, until you realise how often you want to check the time without making it obvious. Subtlety matters.

So I made one.

The brief was simple—something functional, readable, but not distracting. The kind of thing that sits quietly in the background while still doing its job. It’s made from layered walnut plywood, cherry ply, and basswood, with a tree design incorporating the practice logo. Enough detail to feel intentional, but hopefully not enough to draw attention mid-session.

Whether it achieves that balance remains to be seen, but it does tell the time, which feels like a strong starting point.

a box (but slightly more involved than expected)

The second project was for a colleague recovering from surgery. Food gifts were off the table (allergies), which narrowed things down fairly quickly. So instead, I went with something small, contained, and hopefully useful—a box to hold a book voucher.

She likes birds, so I added a budgie design to the front. What I didn’t fully account for was how many individual pieces that design would involve. Each tiny section was laser cut and dropped through the honeycomb bed underneath the wood. Which meant retrieving them one by one, and then working out where they belonged. It ended up being less ‘assembly’ and more ‘jigsaw-on-steroids’.

The pieces are small. Very small. And while the laser does an excellent job of cutting them cleanly, it does not help you put them back together.

That part is entirely on you.

It felt incomplete to give a box without a card, so I made one of those as well.

There’s a small visual pun in the design—subtle enough that it might take a second glance, but hopefully enough to land.

somewhere between useful and unnecessary effort

Both gifts sit in that space between practical and probably-more-effort-than-required. A clock could have been bought. A gift voucher could have gone in an envelope. But there’s something about making the object itself—working through the design, adjusting things that don’t quite fit, and ending up with something that feels considered.

Even if it started as “just a clock” or “just a box.”