Been making slow progress on the card catalog, and I will post some more pictures, but the part I am doing now is tedious, low-reward, and not very visually interesting. So I put it aside last weekend and helped my kid make a box for his teacher.

Time was fairly limited, but we decided to keep it very simple, with no miter keys or dovetails this year. Just a straight mitered box.
I picked up some Orange Agate from Woodcraft after their 20% off Covid sale. I've never worked with it before, or quite frankly even heard of it before. On the outside, it looked like a fairly tight, dense grain with a creamy color, not unlike holly, and then a very red heartwood core. I'm a sucker for contrast. I didn't have any plans for it other than a vague notion of making some sort of stool, bench, or side table out of it. But making a box for my son's teacher seemed like as good an idea as any.






Quick trip to the jointer-planer to clean it up. Noticed right away that it had lost that cream-colored surface, and started showing some signs of spalting and interlocking grain.





Had my son rip it to width:





Things got a lot weirder when I resawed the blanks for a four-corner book match. A lot more spalting in the white sapwood. Meanwhile, the red heartwood was on such a tight radius that even just taking out the width of the resaw blade, the grain didn't line up in a bookmatch. The heartwood would be present on 3/4 of the width of the front face of the board, and almost non-existent on the back face, within half of an inch. I don't know if that is a common thing with exotics, but I'd never seen it before.

The grain just didn't line up right for a bookmatch, so I decided to just align it to the upper boundary of the heartwood. A little off the bottom of one piece, off the top of the other, until I had a reasonably decent match at each corner. Then I ran a top and bottom groove for the lid and bottom on the router, and turned them over to my son to cross-cut: