Rustic Wedding Card Crate

My lovely spouse had the idea of having people drop cards off at our wedding into a box that looked sort of like an old-timey beer shipping crate. She found an example on etsy, and I gave it a shot.

The crate is 19 1/2" x 10 1/2" x 9 5/8" (width, height, depth), made of pine, and assembled in a rustic style. I used a lot of visible nails to join it together. Unlike a lot of furniture, especially the kind of styles that I prefer where invisible joinery is the goal, this is designed to have a rustic style, so the nails work. Also, pine is not really a wood that I typically use. It's light weight, not very strong or durable (janka hardness of 380 lbf), but is common as can be. I picked it up SFS (surfaced on all four sides) from Home Depot. Its light weight also makes it easy to schlep around.

Pine is light in color, a sort of yellowish shade that verges toward white without ever really getting there. The project manager had a darker color in mind, so we turned to stain, specifically, Spiced Walnut Oil Stain, 1/2 Pint. Here's the outcome:

It started like this

It finished like this

Pine takes stain in interesting ways. Some of the grain soaks up the color, other just refuses to darken. It just doesn't want to stain to a uniform color. I happen to like the outcome, but many people don't like the way pine stains. It's a personal preference.

After staining, we stenciled the name and date on with some white paint.

I would be happy to make one for your wedding as well, will stencil on your name and date too, and have them up on my etsy store:  Here.