Jewelry Chest/Night Stand

A co-worker recently asked me if I would be interested in building a piece of furniture for him. His timing was great as I was sort of idle in my shop and was looking for something to build. He told me he wanted a jewelry chest that would also serve as a night stand. The idea sounded sort of funky, but once I began to talk with him and
got his ideas about what he was looking for, I was rolling ideas around in my
head and knew that the project was going to be a fairly easy one.

I still thought the idea was sort of off the wall, but hey, he was footing the bill and as I have
always said…the good thing about custom woodworking is that you can build anything that anyone wants….well, up to a point.

So, here it is…red oak. The first project built from some red oak lumber that I bought out in Pennsylvania. I think I will email the supplier a picture of this to show him. Anyway…the project
was a good opportunity to use my dovetail jig for the drawers and also to get into the tapering of legs. I had done it in the past, but not for a while, so I was jonesin’ for the opportunity to do
so again.

The surface of the table stands thirty inches off of the floor and the upper part that will be used to hand necklaces within raises it another foot. This project also allowed me the practice of keeping the grain orientation of the face skirt of the table. If you take a look at the front of the piece, look at the drawers and the surrounding framework above and below the drawers. You can see that the grain pattern flows as it was all cut from the same piece of wood. For this purpose.

I made my first ever drawer divider with this project and although it wasn’t anything difficult…it was still my first attempt at it and it really makes the drawer it’s in look great. And while I am talking about the drawers…I have to say that I am not that elated about the flocking in the drawers. I have flocked a number of other things and this product simply doesn’t do a good enough job in my opinion. “Flocking”…the felt like lining in the bottom of the drawers is a new innovation whereas you “paint” the surface that you want the lining and then pour powdered felt onto the wet paint and cover all of the wet spots and let it dry. When dry, you empty all of the loose material and you have left a nice edge to edge coating. Trouble is… you really don’t get a satisfactory lining thickness. The search goes on for a better answer for this.

For some reason, I had a bear of a time getting the dovetails just right on the drawers! Don’t know exactly why. The Leigh jig is one of the more exacting jigs and yes, it takes some hit and miss trial and error corrections before you are dialed into the fit, but I just couldn’t hit the mark this time for some reason.

All of that is water under the bridge now though as the project is done and will be delivered within the next few days. Hope everyone is happy with it!