Casket: The pincushion and sliding panel

The last few days I spend on working on the pincushion with it's secret drawer and the finishing of the front panel. A lot of time was spend on just thinking and trying out ways of making the pincushion so that it would be fairly easy to take out so that one can have access to the secret drawer. In the end I decided to use some of my lace pins cut short, the heads are probably a bit large, but I think pins in the 17th century probably had bigger heads than modern ones.

For the sliding panel front I cut very small strips of wood and glued them around the edges of the sliding panel to create a frame for the velvet paper. The real old caskets had some flat tape added to finish of the velvet, but first of all finding a flat tape less than a mm wide just isn't possible and the applying it is another story. Although my method might not be quite historically correct I like how it looks. The brass escutcheon is from Cat's Paw and was colored by the permanent silver pen to get the right look.

Here you can see the pincushion out of it's compartment and you can see the space for the secret drawer that I will build tomorrow, I just ran out of time to still do that today. I also plan on starting the big drawers this week.

Have a great week.
Elga