Wooden Fruit Crates

Be sure to watch the video here.

This week I am making the wooden fruit crates that I put the asparagus in a few weeks ago. I really like how this project turned out. I was working from memory trying to re-create the fruit crates from my childhood. You see when I was a little girl every summer we would take several trips to both eastern Washington and also up to Hood River Oregon to buy ripe fruit. We usually made the first trip sometime in July for cherries and the last one sometime in either September or October for apples. My dad would gather up the fruit boxes from the last trip and put them in the back of the station wagon and off we would go. When we found the fruit that we would purchase dad would trade the boxes we had for the one holding the new fruit and avoid having to pay for the boxes again. We would drive home and mom would spend the next few days canning the fruits we had purchased so we could enjoy them all winter long. Anyway, those were the boxes I wanted for my fruit stand. Of course we no longer have any of the old boxes around here so I worked from memory and pictures on the internet. I hope you enjoy the result as much as I do.

Now on to the how we do this.

We need some pieces of basswood for this in the following sizes:

1/8” by 1/8” square

cut 2 pieces 1” long

4 pieces 1/2” long

1” by 1/16”

cut 1 piece 1 1/2” long

1/4” by 1/16”

cut 4 pieces 1 ½” long

We also need a jumbo craft stick

cut 2 pieces 1” long

For glue I am using both regular tacky glue and zap-a-gap CA glue. I did find that my Quick Grab Tacky just didn't work very well for this project.

I am using a magnetic gluing jig to hold the pieces square, you do need work carefully and make sure your box goes together (and stays) square. A gluing jig is a very helpful tool for this. If you don't have one I do know people also use legos to form a nice square jig for gluing. I can't find any of the legos my older sons used to play with so I can't show you how this works today. If I can find them I will show that in a future video. 

For my farm stand I am going to use the boxes plain, to look like they are new boxes. For a little fun bonus on the video I also made an “old box” with an antique label. Just use your favorite search engine to find the images of the labels online, copy and paste them in a word document (or whatever type of program you have to this type of thing in) and re-size the image to fit the end of you box. Then print, cut it out, glue it on and age it to look as old as you like.