Category: Marquetry

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Cutting a marquetry QR code

WRONG marquetry QR code!! Ten hours wasted on cutting and arranging a pattern of hundreds of tiny squares of wood veneer.

Am I the first person in the world who is barmy enough to hand-cut a marquetry QR code pattern?

More photos (and text) to follow – because I haven’t actually finished this project yet – but this is the current status of my marquetry/parquetry QR code project.

DISASTER!

It took me about 10 solid hours to get as far as I did with the pattern below, but then I had a disaster. I discovered that some free QR code generators are AWFUL, and take you to an intermediate site first. So if I used the pattern below, anyone viewing it would not be sent straight to my website but would be sent to a confusing ad-filled page first, and might not even realise how to access my website. So I had wasted 10 hours.

(On the other hand I’m fairly sure that most people would describe even a successful parquetry QR code as a waste of 10 hours anyway.)

Where the idea came from

I joined the Leeds Marquetry Group in 2022 and am really enjoying learning different marquetry skills. One of the recent club projects involved creating parquetry (using wood veneer pieces to create geometric patterns). First I hated parquetry, but now I’m getting a bit obsessed with it.

parquetry box in progress

The idea for this QR code project surfaced because I wanted to cover a small box with a marquetry design, but because the box had a hinged lid it meant that whatever design I chose, there would be a line running all the way across it where the box and lid met.

So I wanted a design that would include a horizontal line in it, which would disguise the line in the box. Because I’d recently been working on parquetry designs I thought about doing a checkerboard-effect pattern, but the box’s dimensions didn’t divide up neatly into either centimetres or inches, so for some reason that annoyed me and I gave up on that idea. I also wasn’t sure I’d be able to cut lots of tiny squares so precisely that they would fit together without going a bit wonky. I did a bit of Googling of ideas for marquetry on small boxes, and discovered Tunbridge ware patterns, where the design looks like tiny little mosaic pieces, and is created by bunching long slivers of wood together. I loved that idea, but unfortunately don’t yet have the equipment or skills to create any myself. But it sparked a stupid idea in my head, of creating a micro mosaic marquetry pattern, using squares of veneer that were less than 2mm square. I’ve no idea why that thought appealed to me when I’d already rejected the idea of making checkerboard pieces that would have been about 5mm wide.

The next challenge was to think of an actual design for the micro mosaic. I did a bit more Googling of micro mosaic marquetry patterns, but all of that staring at little squares suddenly made a link in my head; the tiny square dots were like the ones that make up a QR code (where you can point a smartphone at the code and it will lead you to a specific website). The idea of making a parquetry QR code was so ridiculous and seemed like such a difficult challenge…and yet it didn’t seem impossible. I mean, “all” I would have to do is cut hundreds of tiny squares of wood veneer so accurately that when I arranged them in the overall design it would be recognised by smartphones as an actual QR code.

A quick online search for “free QR code generators” brought up several – e.g. like the QR code generator by Adobe Express. I created a QR code for my overall website (LaserSister.com), then imported the resulting pattern into CorelDraw so that I could change the size. I wanted to put the code onto the side of my box, so it needed to measure no more than 50mm across.

Before I started I didn’t know how many squares make up a QR code. If I’d have stopped to think about it, I would probably have guessed they were about 20 squares across/down. And then if I’d thought about it for a bit longer, I would have realised that 20×20 = 400, so I’d need to cut a minimum of 400 squares. Fortunately I skipped that thinking stage, otherwise I might not have bothered with the project. Because when I printed the code it turned out that it was actually 29×29 squares. Which is 841 squares. Worse than that was the fact that I needed the code to measure no more than 50mm across. If I’d then bothered to divide 50 by 29, I would have realised that each veneer square would need to be no more than 1.724mm across.

Fortunately I got so carried away with the practicalities of printing off the pattern and applying it to my cutting mat with sticky-backed plastic that I didn’t think about the size (or number) of the little squares until the time came to start cutting them out.

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More Marquetry

More marquetry news this week: I’ve won first prize in the “Beginners’ Applied” category of a marquetry competition – wow!

I’ve been really enjoying my membership of the Leeds Marquetry Group, and last week I entered their annual competition. I submitted the Yorkshire Rose coaster, which was the very first marquetry project that I’d ever completed (and which I wrote about in July here).

I created the design myself, and based the petals on heart shapes. Then found a really pesky, tricky wood to cut it out of. (For such a therapeutic hobby, I do seem to find myself inventing a surprising number of new swear-words.) Then I covered the coaster with a heat-resistant and water-resistant melamine sealant, gave it to my dad as a birthday present, only to pinch it back again to enter it into the competition.

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Marquetry goldfish

As mentioned in this post, I have recently taken up marquetry and I’m really enjoying it. I am now always on the lookout for new projects. This week I’ve combined marquetry with another hobby (fishkeeping), and have cut out a goldfish design. Because I’m still at the learning phase I’m cutting everything by hand, but at some point I’ll probably start to combine hand-cutting with laser-cutting.

This is what I’ve managed so far:

Stages of making the marquetry goldfish

First I chose a piece of veneer. It’s impossible to tell from this photo, but the piece had been dyed to a light greeny-blue shade. Once I’d found the nice wood I traced a basic fish design onto it.

Using the ‘window method‘ of cutting, I started with the dorsal fin. I deliberately made bottom end of the cut longer than it needed to be, so that I could use the inserted fin as part of the window of a later section. So it didn’t matter that there was a gap at the bottom left of the fin.

Selecting a suitable piece of wood by viewing it through the window

Then basically I kept repeating the steps of:

  • cutting a window shape out of the greeny-blue veneer (e.g. fins, body, tail sections)
  • viewing the orange-coloured veneer through the window so I could find a woodgrain that looked as fishy as possible
  • using that window as a guide for cutting the right size of orange-colour veneer to insert into the window
  • glueing (?gluing? Both spellings look wrong) the freshly-cut orange veneer piece into the window.
Cut a window, find a suitable grain of wood, cut the shape, and glue it into the window

Wonderful woodgrain

This is one of the things I like most about marquetry; the way the woodgrain pattern makes each piece absolutely unique. Here the grain not only has lines in it but wavy lines, so the goldfish tail looks even more realistic. And of course, the lines in the greeny-blue wood look nice and watery.

More fins being added:

Pectoral fins cut and inserted:

Bottom section of fish tail has been cut and inserted. Again I was pleased to find some grain that had a bit of a wave to it.

I thought I’d gone horribly wrong here, because it looked like I’d added a clown’s nose to the fish:

…but when the body was cut and inserted, I was very relieved because the nostril thing didn’t stand out much after all. (Note: at this stage the inserted body-section replaced the bottom of the dorsal fin, so removed the previous gap.)

I was also quite chuffed with the way that the woodgrain looked a bit like fish scales:

Fin-ishing touches

Nearly finished, with the mouth and gill inserted, and a window cut out for the eye. The single mouth-and-gill shape was a really difficult shape to cut out. I could have made things easier by cutting it as two pieces instead of one, but fortunately nothing broke while I was doing it.

I forgot to take a picture of how I cut the eye, because it all got a bit tricky at this stage. Here is the finished marquetry goldfish:

The outer section of the eye is just under 5mm in diameter so was fiddly enough to cut by itself, but then I had to cut a 2-ish mm hole out of the middle of it so that I could insert the smaller, darker circle. No finesse at all was involved; I had to just hack away with my scalpel until I’d managed to carve out a hole from the wood.

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Marquetry at the Great Yorkshire Show

Having mentioned in a previous post that I’d started a new hobby of marquetry this year, I was excited to find out this week that one of my competition entries for the Great Yorkshire Show had won a prize. I really am addicted, now!

The Leeds Marquetry Group encouraged all of this year’s (2022) beginners to submit some of our pieces to the GYS, so for the last few months I’ve been tinkering away with several projects and trying to expand my range of skills.

I turned up at the woodworking tent of the show hoping to have a nose around and see what everyone else had been working on this year, and was amazed to discover that I’d won first prize in the category of “applied” marquetry:

(Photo taken by Eileen)

I’m still sure there must have been some mistake! But what I really loved was that all four of the initial-lettered people were there to see their coasters. I hadn’t shown any of the coasters to Rob (husband), Eileen (mum) or Brian (dad) during the time that I was making them, so there were nice surprises all round.

I created the design by first printing out the letters in a giant font size and then drawing square borders around them. Then I used Saral transfer paper to copy the design onto the wood veneer sheets.

Try, try, try again

This was my first ever attempt at hand-cutting wood veneer. When I cut out the K and the background I was fairly happy with the outcome…

…but then noticed that I’d cut the letter too close to the edges of the background veneer (above), so had to start again.

…only to decide that I’d like to make a whole family set of initial letter coasters – at which point I realised that I didn’t have enough of those two veneers above (cherry and birch??) to make a matching set. So I had to start again again.

Favourite wood so far…

I went up to LMG’s wood store, and discovered a lovely veneer. Fiddleback sycamore. Apparently it’s called that because it’s used on the backs of violins and other similar musical instruments. It is a very very attractive wood:

Woof. It’s got a silky, wavy pattern somehow at right angles to the grain.

For a good contrast with the sycamore, I chose a much darker and more grainy-looking wood. I think it’s sapele wood.

Making things (more difficult)

To make life difficult for myself, I decided to try to keep the outer section of the sycamore veneer in one piece. But I also wanted to learn how to apply a border strip (‘stringing’?) around the main design as well, so I mitred some thin sections of the sapele wood and somehow got them to fit between the pieces of the sycamore veneer.

Work in progress, with the two new woods.

That was actually the second most difficult part of the whole project. I must have wasted about 10 strips of wood trying to get them to the correct width and length and fitting nicely together and properly mitred.

By the time I started on the letter R coaster I was a bit more confident with my cutting skills:

…but was horrified by the gaps between the veneers when I held them up to the window:

Fortunately my new friends at LMG assured me that when I actually glued the veneers together and stuck them to the coaster itself, the gaps wouldn’t be as noticeable. Partly because the glue fills in the gaps anyway, but also because the wet glue causes the wood to soften and change shape a bit. The tutors also kindly reminded me that nobody else in the world was going to hold one of my marquetry pieces up to the light to inspect it. Duh.

As part of my marquetry adventure I also discovered a new phenomenon: my pieces always look better from the back than they do from the front!

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New Hobby: Adventures in Marquetry

This year (2022) I started a new hobby. I am now a marquetry enthusiast (in addition to all of my other craft addictions).

I moved house in 2021 (from the south to the north of England) during the covid lockdowns, so for a very long time I wasn’t able to start any new hobbies that involved seeing real people. But in February 2022 I was wishing for a new group or club to join in Yorkshire, and discovered that Leeds Marquetry Group were restarting their beginners’ sessions that very same week. So I signed up. And it turns out that marquetry is a brilliant pastime for me, because it seems to combine a lot of the skills that I’ve already been building up via my other crafts, over the years.

Through my papercutting experiments I’ve already learned how to use a scalpel to do some very intricate cutting…

…and through my lasercutting artworks I’ve learned some of the characteristics and limitations of working with different types of wood veneers:

So marquetry basically involves a mash-up of my existing craft skills.

The very first project I completed was a Yorkshire Rose coaster:

As with my papercutting projects there are quite a few errors that really jump out at me when I look at this piece, but overall I’m really pleased with it. I designed it myself (starting out with petals that were based on heart shapes) then cut it by hand, and there were some really challenging sections in it.

The best thing about Leeds Marquetry Group is that everyone is so friendly and helpful. In just a few months I’ve learned more about cutting, gluing, sanding and varnishing wood than I could have ever learned from books or the internet. I’m looking forward to learning even more, over the next year.