Trillium Exchange 2016

I signed up for the Trillium Exchange again. It has been a couple of years since my last one. The Trillium Exchange is a bit of fun where members of the SCA Kingdom of Ealdormere are paired with another participant and then make a gift for that person. Everyone tries to match the gift to their recipient's persona, likes, or possibly even just based on their favorite colours.

My recipient this year plays a 14th Century Englishwoman, the daughter of a rich wool merchant. She likes playing period games so I decided to carve her a game box, embroider a "Game of Goose" board, and carve the game pieces. I am still debating on whether I want to make her a set of dice or simply purchase modern ones.

My inspiration for the game box is housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/468458. The original is in bone but I am carving it in wood. So far I have managed to get all four panels for the bottom of the box completed and stained.

 This is an image of my carved panels. They were carved in basswood, painted white with acrylic paint, then stained with a thick walnut stain. The excess stain was wiped away. My hope was to make it look like aged bone.

These pieces will be glued onto a box made from poplar. A small box lock has been purchased and will be installed so that the box as closely as possible resembles the original, the pictures posted below.

As with last exchange, the post will not be published until after my recipient as received their gift.

 

Completed Project

I ended up not making any progress posts after my initial one so I am updating this post with the finished work and publishing it before I find another project to distract me.

I ended up making the box, the embroidered game board,  and six game pieces. When the amount of time it took to finish the embroidered board, I decided I did not have time to make the die so I purchased a standard set of white plastic with black pips. In the documentation I included the rules to the goose game as well as a few rules for dice games.

 The game board is approximately 15 inches square. On one page for the rules they mentioned that the original game could include a drinking tile, making it an adult drinking game, so I included a foaming mug of beer on tile 61.

Each goose is freehand drawn so no two are alike. I tried to make the pose different for each goose as well.

Other images include bridges, a house, a well, a labyrinth, a cell door, and a skull and cross bones.

The recipient's favorite colour was purple. I had a violet cotton fabric that I used to line the box bottom and lid. To line the box I glued the fabric over a single layer of cotton batting onto a piece of veneer cut to the right size. This was then glued to the inside of the box.

The game pieces were carved from scrap wood I had laying around. The three lighter pieces are basswood, cedar, and poplar. The well and tower are made from red oak, and the mug is made from a piece of butternut. The handle for the mug was carved separately then joined to the body of the mug.


Once the entire box was done I went back over and made sure all the sides were as similar to each other in colour as possible. My original plan had been to make it white with some aging added with the stain. Unfortunately, the panels absorbed the stain at different rates and strengths so in the end I made the box a fairly uniform light brown with white highlights showing through.

This was the largest project I have completed to date. The relief carving was not a new skill but also not one that I had spent a great deal of time perfecting.

The same can be said for the embroidery. Not a new skill but not one I had spent a lot of time working on over the years.

Lining the box and mounting a flush lock were new skills but the relied on my previous wood carving and fabric skills.

With everything said and done I spent a solid 4.5 months, working every day for 4-6 hrs a day to complete this project. I am quite happy with the results of the carving but I see lots of room for improvement as well. It was good to push myself and I hope to do some more relief carving and embroidery work again soon.