Starting A Lilly Blanket Chest

Once a year in July  the Stonewall Gallery gallery located in the basement of Campbell Pottery in Edinboro Pa. holds the Lily Festival Juried Art Show.  I have been entering this show for the last three years and have sold  a few things and I got my first commission from this show.

Stonewall Gallery

Well its time to get started on this years entry and I think this years project will be pretty ambitious. I've  made a couple tables and some small boxes for this show so I wanted to try something different this year. I remembered seeing some real nice blanket chest on the web and had kept a few pics for inspiration. One of my favorites from these was from Craig Thibodeau Fine Furniture.

Dogwood Blanket Chest

I kind of liked the idea of not worrying about using Cedar in this chest as a lot of these blanket chest don't use it.
I  almost forgot how much time is spent researching and planning something like this. I haven't any drawing skills to speak of so I find pictures from books,magazines, the net, or were ever I can find them. I then copy or print them out and do tracing's to come up with my pictures for marquetry.

This is a collection of images I used for the tracing's to get the pictures I'll use for the marquetry. I print them in black and white and then use a light box I made to trace them onto tracing paper.






On this project I combined a number of images to create the pictures, sort of like a mash-up, leaves from one picture with flowers from another. I want to add some other things to bring interest into this like a dragonfly, a Lilly leaf beatle,and a couple butterfly's, so I made prints of those also.

I have a pretty good idea of how I want this to look so it will just be a matter of drawing up a couple of sketches  to nail down exactly what I will build but I can actually get started on the marquetry  while I iron out the design. I just hope I have enough time to get this thing done before the deadline.