Exotic Wood Jewelry Scrap to Scrumptious

Learning how to woodwork? Who, me??? I would have never thought it. As I was standing at the drill press one evening, I was thinking that very thought aloud to the person who was teaching me. His reply was simply, "Well, what is it that you are making?" Enough said.

It began simply enough many years ago, when I was watching my ex-husband build his heirloom quality jewelry boxes from some of the most beautiful, hand picked and figured exotic woods I had ever seen. There were some thin flat pieces of colorful scraps that I thought would be really pretty glued up. I didn't know then that laminated was the terminology I should use. While he was busily working, I grabbed a bottle of wood glue, and began to place these pieces asthetically together, one by one. When I was finished "playing", I showed it to my ex, beaming like I actually did something. He showed me how to clamp them together so they'd dry tightly, how to clean off the glue that squeezed out, and I let it be, for the time being. I have the attention span of a gnat sometimes, so after a couple of days, the laminate piece was forgotten about.

Many years later, I was back out in that same woodshop. I had been seriously working on pieces of a madrone burled wood necklace in the making, when that laminated piece appeared out of what seemed like nowhere. It actually startled me when I spied it, and it seemed to be calling me, calling my name. I was already in the middle of my next necklace when images started forming in my mind of what I could do with that piece of laminate. The two pieces of purpleheart and bloodwood, pictured above, were only two of the colors used in the laminate, but were my choices for the parts to form the chain. Part II later...