20th Custom Woodworking Design Portfolio: People's Choice
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20th Custom Woodworking Business Design Portfolio
People's Choice Winner:

Zongkers Custom Woods Inc.

Omaha, NE • zongkers.com

Project: Traditional Jewelry Box

Description: This traditional style jewelry box is 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. It is 20” wide x12” tall x 10 ½” deep.

My goals were to use veneer on the inside and outside with a matching grain pattern. Also by matching the veneer from straight sides to radius doors and adding 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.

(See all Design Portfolio winners here.)

Construction Process: For the leaves a green popular was used to represent the natural color of the leaves of a rose bush. For the decorative pattern on the top dyed black maple was used for overlapping the scrolls and leaves for a mix and design balance. The scrolls on the top and stems on the radius doors have myrtle burl, which is a darker greenish brown, for the stems and scrolls to have a natural blending color. The trim on the box is a solid Birdseye maple, which was a great mix with the walnut burl. The Birdseye has a marble look to it and this helps lead your eyes first to the veneered walnut burl background and marquetry.

It has two side doors with a single rose done in marquetry and when opened it has two rotating necklace carousels to display necklaces. The front door has marquetry of three roses and when you open it there are three hidden drawers for more storage for the larger pieces of jewelry. When you open the top lid it has dividers that are made out of birds-eye maple.

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