Variation. Voiglander Color-Skopar 75mm

This is a detail of a headboard I made some years back.  My editor used the gable of our armoire  (from yesterday's Blip) as the inspviration.  I used some left-overs from various harpsichords to echo the Cape Dutch light-and-dark motif. The ground is Cedar of Lebanon, with Walnut burl and Holly stringing inlayed.  Burl is one of Nature's great gifts: it is basically a cancer growing on the tree which causes the wood to grow in very strange, convoluted yet exquisite patterns, perpendicular to the tree's normal growth, sideways out of the trunk as it were.  When the lumber merchants receive such a tree, they cut off the burl and either sell it as a flitch of veneer, each leaf of which is pretty-much identical to the next, or whole for the wood-turning crowd to turn into beautiful vessels.  Because each leaf of veneer is so nearly identical to its neighbor, the leaves can be glued up to form symmetrical patterns in a process called bookmatching. On the vertical part of the inlay, at the bottom of the image is a four-way match.  Now if one could make money from woodworking...