Need Advice On Building Jewelry Box ?

Q: I'm looking to build a jewelry box for my wife. It's going to be a fairly elaborate thing about 11 inches high with doors and drawers. I've seen similar things in the department stores, but I want to build it myself. I'm thinking of making it out of 1/4 and 1/2" cherry (have to see if I can get it at the sawmill first) Is cherry easy to work with and priced reasonably or should I use another wood and stain it? Not sure how I'm going to do the joinery. I've seen a couple books on building wooden boxes, but at the time I was looking for jewelry box plans and should have been checking out the joinery techniques. Anybody built anything similar to this. Any advice would be appreciated.

A:-I did one for SWMBO after Christmas. I used wormy maple with walnut accents and combined several ideas from different sources. She wanted it wall mounted so it does not have a traditional base. -I have build a few jewelry boxes. The job is not much different than other woodwork. You probably need finer detail because you are working with smaller pieces. The 1/4" wood sounds better than thicker material. Do not mistake the small size in thinking that the job will be easy. -Cherry would not be my favorite worrk. Sometimes it does not stain uniformaly. As you will only be using a couple board feet of wood it would not be expensive to get one of the exotics -the only advise i can give is that we bought a jewelry box at a thrift store... it ahd two drawers on the front that you pull out and one door that came down and had some velvet inside to put rings into the slots... cost about $2.50. was gonna take it apart

and finish the wood finish... turned it over and could hear someting inside it????? thought it was one of the draws sliding around... turned it upside down and then opened the pull down door and out fell an 18K gold metal mans right with a tigerstone in the front(looks like it cost about $150 or so.. i guess whoever had this box probably passed away and the family went through their things and then gave what they never wanted to the thrift store?? just telling you that if this jewelry box was made a little better the ring never would have fell into the empty cavity in the back of the pull down drawer and the family would have recovered the ring when they opened it up....