Dinner conversation with friends last
night turned to the matter that typically purpose precedes design.
Such was the case with my “quilted-wood” headboad 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.
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