Wednesday, July 8, 2009

What Next?!!!?

I've started a couple of new projects and I'm at a point where I'm really not sure what to do next. As I had planned, I took the three inch thick piece of curly maple and made a pair of book-matched wedges, bordered with cherry on the sides.
They are a little more than 2.5" at one end and 1/8" at the other. I had thought that I would arrange the thick ends on opposite side and make it a horizontal piece but after opening it up I decided it worked better with the thick ends together with a vertical direction. I find it is a little more interesting and complex to flip a book-match so the pattern is symmetrical but on opposite ends. The big question I have right now is how to join them together and, what if anything else, to add. I am thinking that I might want to have cherry or walnut laths pass through them like "Five by Ten".

"Five by Ten"
©Robert Hitzig
As I was beginning to add laths to see how they would look, I got the feeling they were taking on a human form and thought about adding circular pieces on the tops, but then couldn't think of a way to do it without making them look too human and forced. Laths are probably the way to go, I'll have to play around with different configurations. I believe another question I'll have is adding balance though. The lower halves are so thin, the laths can only be added to the top.

With the second half of the same board, I resawed it into three sections. I had wanted to make some more wedges but the outside section was too rounded, leaving large gaps in the wood. No matter how many ways I thought of doing it, it just wasn't going to work. However, with the three sections, I still have to decide what to do about the missing wood. One thought I had (my first thought) was cutting it square and filling it in with section of cherry or walnut, leaving open rectangles and then glueing stripes of cherry or walnut in between the flitches to create one large panel. A second idea is to use the lath idea again to connect them and just clean up, rather than remove, the natural edges of the tree. This will take much more thinking.


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