While at a family gathering recently (see here, here, and here if you want the gory details.) one of my sisters, let's call her L, pulled me aside several times for some highly secret discussions. My other sister, let's call her G, had a birthday coming up and sister L wanted to present sister G with a new jewelry box; and she wanted me to make it.
Like highly skilled secret agents, sister L and I had several clandestine meetings and some highly classified photos of the existing jewelry containment system were even exchanged, all without sister G, or anyone else at the three day reunion, having a clue.
Normally when you think custom jewelry box the custom is on the outside, but in this case the 'box' would be living inside a vanity drawer and is actually more of a tray than a box. Since it would be living down inside a drawer the outside of the box would be pretty much hidden and there would be no top to gussy up, so I had to focus any fancy details on the inside of the tray instead.
After a little back and forth between myself and secret agent sister L this is the concept I drew up.
One large tray to sit in the bottom of the drawer with a smaller tray sitting on top of that. The small tray can be slid forward or back to access all of the bottom tray.
The trays themselves are made of Teak.
The rails in the bottom tray are an alternating laminate of Black Walnut and Tiger Maple.
The rails for the top tray are Red Heart Cedar rings turned on the lathe.
And the whole thing sits in the drawer something like this with enough room at the back of the drawer to accommodate the few odds and ends sister G keeps back there.
With me there's always a little bit (Sometimes a lot!) of play between concept and finished piece and this was no exception.
As you can see, I added a second small tray and eliminated the row of small compartments in the lower tray. I did this after I got concerned about the number of post type earrings sister G has and found through experimenting that reaching down into small compartments in the lower tray for them was a bit awkward. (Almost as awkward as that sentance!)
While I was at it I added an inlay band around the outside of both the small trays which will be visible when they are lifted out of the drawer (One handed via the turned knobs I added to them.) to access the lower tray.
If you're into that sort of thing, over the next several posts I'll be going into more detail on the construction of this jewelry 'box'.
