Marquetry

This Present Distraction 2

With the slim plywood “box” done for my new Kindle case it was time to move on to the tricked-out phase.  That involved the assembly of a parquetry pattern from my inventory of 60-120-60 parallelogram lozenges.

I knew right away that I did not have enough lozenges cut and trimmed to complete the job so I took some of the wood strips from my selection and sawed another bunch, enough to fill my little box to the top.  I then shot the edges on my dedicated shooting board, fist shooting one pair of adjoined edges then rotating the lozenge onto the upper station, first planing one edge then flipping the lozenge and planing the adjacent one.  I find this entire process of building up a stack of lozenges to be extremely calming, an especially respite in this current week.  Plus, it let me put my sublime c.1810-50 Robert Towell miter plane to good use (fortunately for me Towell was careless about stamping his planes, otherwise I could not have afforded to buy this uber sewwt tool.  Take note of the near-invisible opening in the sole!)   I would have used the parquetry shooting plane I made last year but for the life of me I could not find where I put it.  Sometimes having 7000 s.f. and several non-adjacent work spaces can be a curse, and this is one of those times.

With enough of the finished lozenges in-hand I started setting them down on kraft paper after first drawing right angle bisecting lines to guide the work.