"Quilted-Wood" Headboard

Dinner conversation with friends last night turned to the matter that typically purpose precedes design. Such was the case with my “quilted wood” headboard where the purpose was somehow to mimic the feel and pattern of the quilt in the wood. To match the beige background material I chose hard maple. To mimic the dark border of the quilt I chose cherry. I then measured the size of the four-block cloth pattern and duplicated it with wooden blocks of the exact same dimensions. A template was made and the four-block pattern was routed, not easily, out of the hard maple field into which the wooden blocks were embedded. I thought briefly about a more dramatic, high contrast set of woods, say ebony, zebrawood, bubinga, purpleheart, but aside from my aversion to tropical hardwoods, I sought more muted and subtle variations in order to echo the feel of the quilt. Thus, I chose North American woods, both soft and hard: Douglas fir, redwood, hemlock, cherry, black walnut and oak. The basic form of suspending the headboard on dowels (maple) from the posts I have used before, one of its advantages being that the headboard is easily removed from the posts with 8 screws making it possible to transport the piece in even a small coupe. These two will likely stay companions for a very long time.