Walnut Box

Hi All,
Firstly, regarding the title of this post. I'd like to point out that it concerns a box made from walnut wood and not a box to keep walnuts in.

Anyway, I had this idea to make a box with my scroll saw and decorate it with a design of fuchia flowers. I would burn the flowers into the wood with my pyrography iron and then paint them. The box would have fret work sides and top and as such should be suitable as a pot-pourri container.

One of the main reasons for purchasing a scroll saw was the scope it would give me in making boxes for my pyrography work and I thought this project would be good practice. Over the next three or four posts I will go through the process in detail, from the purchase of the wood to the completed project.

The starting point with any project revolving a scroll saw or pyrography is in acquiring some wood, so I purchased a small plank of walnut measuring 4inches by 18 inches from a company called Hobbies.com. The plank of wood is 6mm thick (about a quarter of an inch) and believe it or not but that is the largest plank of hardwood of that thickness that I can find anywhere. If anybody knows a source of bigger pieces of quarter inch hardwood please let me have the details.

By the way, this was the first time I'd worked with walnut and have to say I was a bit disappointed by its appearance. The tables and other items I've seen on the antiques road show that have been made from walnut always look fantastic and they made the piece of wood I'd received look some what dowdy by comparison. Perhaps it will look much better when it has been finished off. I do hope so because this sniffling little piece of wood cost me almost a fiver.

Once the wood arrived I designed the overall shape of the box on it. Once it was divided up into the six parts that make up a box I could then start working on the design. Here is the plank of walnut after I  divided it the parts for the box.

I would concentrate on the front and sides of the box first, so that was where my design began. I measured the size of the front and opened a new blank file in adobe photoshop to that exact size.
I then drew a image of a fuchia with a pencil onto a piece of paper. I used a pencil so that I could keep rubbing the image out until I was happy with it. When I finally had a stylised image of a fuchia that I thought would suit my needs, I went over image with a pen and then scanned it into my computer.

Okay, so perhaps it isn't the most spectacular fuchia you ever did see and it won't win any prizes at the Chelsea flower show, but I have every faith that it will look good on the finished box. Once the fuchia was in the computer it was a simple matter of copying the image and pasting it into the the blank file I had opened earlier.

This is the way I do most of my design work and I will go on to explain the next steps in my next post.