A couple of wall-hangings

[Lee DeRaud]

I had a whole bunch of Rockler peel-and-stick veneer left over from another project, thought it was time to use it for something:
IMG_0297.jpg
It's 23"x34", on 3/4" melamine backing. The image is from a butterfly I found on my patio last summer. Bad news, it was dead...good news, that meant I could put it into the scanner. That "photo", cleaned up and run through VectorMagic (and then cleaned up a lot more), ended up being 129 pieces.

That didn't use up as much of the veneer as I expected, so a half-hour or so fooling around with Corel yielded this:
IMG_0277.jpg
About 19" diameter, on a 21"x22" chunk of birch ply, 217 pieces.

(Hopefully it won't take me as long to frame and hang these as the veneer spent in the supply closet.)

Something smaller for my mom's apartment for Mother's day:
IMG_0279.jpg
Four 3.8" tiles from LaserTile.

[Dee Gallo]

Oh Lee, those are just fantastic! I'll have to look at my husband's Rockler catalog more seriously now. I recently did a very small inlay for someone who is making a guitar, but this is ART. Love it!

Thanks for sharing, dee

[Pete Simmons]

Lee - Are those inset into the backing at all or are they thin enough to just stick on?

[Lee DeRaud]

Lee - Are those inset into the backing at all or are they thin enough to just stick on?

You mean the tiles?

They're about 0.3" thick, with about a 1/16" crown on the face side, and the glaze doesn't go down the edges much past that. So they're set into holes in a piece of 1/4" MDF, with the red matte board cut to fit tight. Then there's a solid 1/8" MDF backer that everything is hot-glued to.

(If you mean the veneer, it's just stuck on the backer, which is way bigger than my laser could handle anyway.)

[Joe Pelonio]

I had a whole bunch of Rockler peel-and-stick veneer left over from another project, thought it was time to use it for something:

That didn't use up as much of the veneer as I expected, so a half-hour or so fooling around with Corel yielded this:
IMG_0277.jpg
About 19" diameter, on a 21"x22" chunk of birch ply, 217 pieces.

Just 1/2 hour in Corel is pretty darned fast for that. I'm curious though, how long it took to glue that up. Some beautiful work Lee.

[Lee DeRaud]

Just 1/2 hour in Corel is pretty darned fast for that. I'm curious though, how long it took to glue that up.

That design is a lot simpler than it looks: 24 circles rotated at 15deg intervals around a tangent point. Most time-consuming thing was cutting the unused segments out of the middle. Once that's done, you've only got ten different shapes to deal with: the center "star", and nine different "diamonds".

Key concept is "peel-and-stick veneer": I got to the point I could peel and set the 24 pieces in each 'ring' while the next batch was cutting. Maybe an hour total to cut and assemble...sanding and finishing was maybe two hours, but spread over three days.

(OTOH the butterfly took an hour to cut and five hours to assemble, even though it had half as many pieces.)

[Joe Pelonio]

Lee,

I have plenty of veneer but no peel/stick. It seems that it saved you quite a bit of time compared to glue? Also, lack of glue should save sanding time with no excess oozing out. I'd love to do more inlay work and it sounds like peel & stick is a big help, so far I have trouble finding time to do the fun stuff.

[Frank Corker]

Lee absolutely beautiful. The poor old moth would probably have been happy to know that he has been imortalised (but he's dead ). Love the circles, they would make a nice wall hanging for sure.

[Lee DeRaud]

I have plenty of veneer but no peel/stick. It seems that it saved you quite a bit of time compared to glue?

"Saved quite a bit of time" is a bit of an understatement: I have absolutely no idea how I'd even start to do a glue-up on something this complicated with standard veneer.
I know it's possible, I just don't have the chops.

[Mike Null]

Lee

Beautiful work. Thanks,

[Darren Null]

Those are excellent.

[Belinda Barfield]

Very nice work Lee! I have a lot of veneer sitting around. You have inspired me to do something with it. Thanks for sharing!

[Barbara Buhse]

Its beautiful.
And here I am STILL working on Gerry Garcia!