A couple of good friends from school got married this spring. I wanted to send them something special to celebrate! Being a designer, she had designed a really cool logo/crest for their invitations and website and favours. I thought it was really cool, and wanted to use it in some way.
It was a bit tricky, since I had a printed version that was about an inch in diameter. I scanned it and blew it up to a size where I could have a chance at cutting it out of wood. Unfortunately, the outer text was still too small, so I decided to opt for the inner section only. I was originally thinking of doing it as an ornament, but Jerome chimed in that he thought something more practical would be fun. And so we came up with the idea of a pair of inverse coasters, which could be both practical and decorative.
Here you can see the marquetry completed. I didn't manage to take any process pictures as it required a lot of concentration to get all the tiny curved parts just right. But you can see that the cut out of one colour becomes the insert on the other. So by cutting both at once very carefully, I ended up with two!
Here is a close up of the front of one of them without the tape.
I cut two circles to final dimension from thin plywood. To make them look nicely finished, I first glued a band of veneer around the circle. You have to do this in two parts. The first is show here, where you glue almost all the way around, and leave long tails. Once this is dry, you cut through both layers at once on the unglued part, so you get a really tight and hopefully invisible seam. You then glue that last little section. The high-tech clamp you use for this process is a bunch of elastic bands!
Next is gluing the top and bottom on. I don't have any pictures as all you really see is a lot of clamps. The top is tricky because it tries to slip off of center when you tighten the clamps. Luckily, it worked out pretty well on these. This one had slipped by a half mm, but I managed to recoup reasonably, and hopefully no one will mind it being out of centered by that tiny amount.
After it's all glued and done, final sanding, I put a bunch of coats of Waterlox finish, to ensure it would be okay if any drips from a glass landed on it. And then I buffed it with wax to make it nice and shiny and give it even more protection.
I also stamped my initials and the year on the backs before finishing. It's a very subtle way to sign a project.
I shipped them out (several months late) and after a lot of fretting and hoping the postal services would do their thing, I got a call from my friend saying it had arrived and they really liked them and had put them on their newly arranged bar area! I hope they'll enjoy them as fun mementos of their happy day!
