Marquetry Belt Buckles

Just over a year ago, I started making marquetry belt buckles. This past week I finished my 7th, so thought it might be time to blog about them! They are nice small projects (2" x 3") that are good for trying techniques on a small scale and have the benefit of being a cool useful item when they're done. I wear one of them almost every day, and enjoy choosing the one that fits my mood for the day.

This is my most recent one. A 1-up mushroom from Mario. I used this to try sand shading for the first time. The darkened areas of the mushroom that give it a more round look are achieved by holding the individual pieces in a pan of hot sand and basically toasting them! I also tested out a shellac finish on this one. The green material is a dyed veneer, and you have to be more careful with the finish so that it doesn't run. This was a good test, as I am working on a bigger project with similar veneer and wanted to have the process figure out before applying it to the big project. 

This was my very first belt buckle. I was hesitant to spend a lot of time cutting out a pattern, not know how it would work and how it would hold up to everyday wear. It worked better than I expected, hence making so many more. I used regular polyurethane for the finish on this one. 

This was a design I doodled one day, I thought the idea of a heart shaped gear was kind of neat. I cut it carefully and got two for one. By stacking the two colours on top of each other, the cut out of one, inserts in the other, and you get two very different looking buckles with the same design. I tried using Waterlox as a finish on these for the first time. I really liked how easy it was to apply and how durable it was as a finish. 

For these two, I used the same process to get two versions of the same design. I wanted to recreate an Escher tesselation, highlighting the main piece. So I decided to practice woodburning on veneer to outline all the surrounding flying fish. It was interesting to see how the veneer handled the wood burning and practicing how much heat and pressure to apply to get the right result. 

And then of course you may already know I'm a big Lego fan, so I decided to make a Lego Minifigure buckle. The main challenge to this one was to cut the tiny hands without them falling apart or cracking. I also got to see how to create the separation between the arms and the body by just making a cut in the wood. 

To turn these little pieces into belt buckles I buy these buckles from Amazon, and just screw them onto the back. The nice thing about this is, if I decide later I am tired of one design, I can just remove the hardware and attach it to a new buckle design!