The signature feature of Byrdcliffe furniture is the colored carvings designed by Zulma Steele and Edna Walker. The image at right is the drop-front panel of the Iris Desk. In original pieces there are several variations of the iris, and in my book “Shop Drawings for Byrdcliffe Furniture” are drawings for building the desk, the wall cabinet seen in a few magazine articles, a bookcase with a door, and a chair with a carved back splat. When building furniture drawings that are scaled to fit on a standard page are fine, but when it comes to recreating a carving there is no substitute for a full size pattern. In my work I print the pattern full size, stick it to the wood with spray adhesive and do the initial carving through the paper print. When I created the book I included the carving patterns scaled to fit the page with a grid over the pattern. That’s a time-tested method, but it’s time consuming to recreate the grid and draw the pattern. Modern technology now allows a reader to photocopy a page from a book and scale the page until it is full size. Better than doing it by hand, but it can still be slow and tedious.

Click on image for larger version

To make things as easy as possible for my readers, I’ve put all 30 of the patterns from the book into a single PDF file. Each image is formatted to print at actual size on standard paper sizes. About a third of the patterns fit on “letter” or “legal” size paper so you can print them from home on virtually any printer. The rest require larger sheets, (ranging from 11″ x 17″ to 24″ x various lengths), and those can be handled by almost any local “copy & print” center.

You can find patterns quickly in the PDF by browsing in the Page Thumbnails on the left side of the screen. Each design is in two forms; with and without the grid. The grid is handy for lining the image up with the edge of something, and you can measure the spacing on the grid to make sure the scaling is correct. The grid-less version contains only the image and the image border so you can use that to create just about anything from an image to hang on the wall, or lines to send to your laser or CNC machine.

Instructions are included for printing and for exporting individual sheets from the PDF. This short video gives you a look at the contents:

This PDF is now available for sale as a download, in conjunction with the publication of the book “Shop Drawings for Byrdcliffe Furniture”. Click the button below to purchase only the Carving Patterns PDF, or follow this link to purchase with the book at a special price.

Click the button below to purchase the PDF download of “Full Size Byrdcliffe Carving Patterns” for $29.95	View cart and complete your order