Scribblings...

Got a pretty quiet day here in the office so I've been scribbling out some detailed ideas for the next project. As I said earlier on, we picked up a rather attractive marble top in France made from fossils and as SWIMBO is well into here fossils it made it's way home in the Landy without mishap. I'm currently I pondering about having two pairs of frames arranged as a cross and linking each pair will be a solid rail at each short end, about 200mm wide or so. Inset into the rail will be some burr elm with an ebony line around the outside of the panel, so the current train of thought is that it could look quite good as it'll incorperate lots of 'birds mouth' tenons and shaping with rasps on the frames. What I need to do over the next couple of days is to get the drawing gear out and start to draft things up full size. The critical thing is to try and get the proportions of the piece as pleasing as possible, trying to incorperate the Golden Ratio (if I can) for the burr elm panels, but not only that, the spaces each side of the panels have got to look right. It's a tricky business and one which'll mean a lot of 'rubbing out' till it looks spot on. The main timber will be in English Cherry as I got a lovely board from Yandles a couple of weeks ago. Once the design has been finalised the timber can be chopped up into rough lumps and left to condition a bit more in the 'shop.