Details on these two traditional jewelry boxes are excerpted from my upcoming book, Wooden Boxes: Skill-Building Techniques for Seven Unique Projects (©2013, The Taunton Press) due out this fall. It will feature seven completed projects, which include these boxes, and it will have detailed step-by-step instructions, from the beginning to the end on how to build each one.

These traditional-style jewelry boxes show one with marquetry and one without. Both are made with walnut burl veneer with bird’s eye maple for the trim. The veneers used in the marquetry were purpleheart for the roses, popular veneer for the leaves, with ebony and myrtle burl veneers for the scrolls.

My goals for this project were to use veneer on the inside and outside with a matching grain pattern. I also wanted to match the veneer from straight sides to radius doors and add marquetry to the top and all three radius doors with a rose theme pattern with scrolls mixed into the top.

The side and front doors have two different radiuses. I made two radius forms for veneering the marquetry and veneer onto the face and inside door at the same time in a vacuum press bag. I cut the marquetry using a packet method on a delta scroll saw and shaded some of the pieces in a hot silica sand to create shadow and depth.

I choose walnut burl for the main veneer for a natural rich background color, mixed with purpleheart veneer for the roses which is a great color to match up to the walnut burl without either wood being too over dominate of each other. For the leaves, I used a green poplar to represent the natural color of the leaves of a rose bush. For the decorative pattern on the top I used dyed black maple.

Excerpted from Zongker’s upcoming Wooden Boxes: Skill-Building Techniques for Seven Unique Projects, this was a People’s Choice winner in the latest Custom Woodworking Business Design Portfolio awards.

View a step-by-step slide show of this wood jewelry box project.