Fantasy Meets Reality. Lumix M4/3 14mm.

A final design for the decorative  details of the Cape Dutch drawers and cabinet came over from the Art Department.  I set the printout on a leaf of the olive-ash burl which will be used to veneer the cabinet and drawer fronts. 
A little explanation is probably in order:  a burl is an abnormal growth which develops on a tree trunk.  Some can be many feet long and wide. The growth takes place at right angles to the tree's normal vertical development.  So, if the entire burl is removed from the felled tree, and then sliced into sheets of veneer, each consecutive slice will be almost identical to the one before, like slices of bread in a loaf.  Cabinet makers take advantage of this to create decorative patterns by "book matching" the consecutive leaves.  The match can be two-way, four-way, or depending how many leaves are available, it can be what is called a "sunburst" pattern.  I have ten leaves in one flitch, enough to do an eight-way radial match on the cabinet door with a couple of spares if there are problems with the material.  The drawer fronts will have two or four-way matches in a linear pattern. 
One cannot merely take the veneer and glue it to one side of a panel.  The whole thing would twist itself into a pretzel because of the uneven tension being applied to the panel.  So one must glue a counter-veneer to the reverse side to equalize that tension.  I have spent a week making the door: planks of solid wood glued together to make up a panel of the correct dimensions. And then both surfaces veneered with the grain running at right angles to the inner boards to give the door dimensional stability.  The burl then is glued to that cross-veneer.  One doesn't want to see any of the inner panel, so all the edges must be veneered in burl beforehand.  This is why custom cabinetry is so expensive; there are really no shortcuts to the process, even with the use of machine tools.  It's been years since I last did veneer work, and I'm just remembering how much I enjoy this subset of the woodworking trade.  It's the journey more than the destination - but then the destination will be there to enjoy for a very long time.