I have mostly finished decorating the inside of my doll-sized, soon-to-be embroidered, 17th-Century casket. I just need to decorate the insides of the lids.

Unfortunately, the outside is still naked.

I haven’t installed the hinges yet, but here’s what you see when you remove the top lid and the doors. They are covered with silk tissue taffeta. It was a challenge to work with such thin silk and not have the glue show through. So after much trial and error, I resorted to archival, double-sided adhesive film and it worked great.

The slant top features a removable box covered in marbled paper.

Here’s what it looks like under the lid.

A box on the left, the pincushion with hidden drawer on the right and the ink tray in the center front are removable.

I wanted to better show the scale, so here’s the pincushion with my fingers. My Kool-Aid dyed silk velvet doesn’t look too bad on the pin cushion. It is stuffed with wool felt.

As you can see, I have chosen not to finish every part of the inside of the casket. I like leaving some of the bare wood showing.

The trim around the drawer fronts is a piece of tiny, antique silver braid that I applied glue to (so it wouldn’t ravel) and cut in half lengthwise. I painted the diamond-shaped escutcheons with a silver-leafing pen. The rings are 3mm silver-plated closed jump rings held in place with minuscule flat, silver trim.

All the drawers are lined with marbled paper, too.

I finished the inside to test fit everything with the trims, silk and paper linings in place before making more caskets. I only had to make two 1mm adjustments. Not bad for 161 cut pieces of wood.

I am keeping track of the time it takes to make these two additional caskets. This is 2 1/2 hours work so far.

One will be a “double” casket with the slanted lid like mine and one will be a flat top. I want to know how much time and material it takes before I set a price to (hopefully) sell them.