Before members of the Marquetry Society of Great Britain start reaching for their poison pens, I should say straight away that our objectives with this particular piece of marquetry where very limited and, by and large, I think we reached those objectives. The design, and I will come to that in more detail, was not a complicated attempt at a trompe d'oeil depiction of the English Rose but something more abstract and, I hope, more simple and perhaps more expressive. We didn't aim for faultless joints and immaculate cutting. I wanted a thin glue line between each piece, for that would delineate and strengthen the design. I think Tom was quite hurt when he came back to me with a beautifully fitting panel that had almost totally eliminated the glue lines and I said "Ah, sorry Tom I really want those glue lines. Go back to a nice, wet, slack fit".

However, returning to my spring flowers, I conceived the idea of running these designs that would express the seasons around the cabinet. On the left hand side we would have a spring panel, the two doors would have summer flowers and the right hand panel an expression of the autumn. I couldn't bear the thought of winter so I didn't include it. My problem at the start was how

to get simple direct designs that reflected these three seasons. I began in the spring with snowdrops. We are blessed where I live with a great bank of a very rare and rather delicate type of snowdrop. These I picked and took into the workshop and made a series of drawings. This gave me the idea for white on white. A white Maple background with white Ripple Sycamore flowers. This would be the theme that linked the four panels. I did the designs for the snowdrop panel well before Tom began work on the cabinet in the summer. This was really to be nothing more than a glorified picture frame, for the construction was a series of frames finished with cross grained Walnut mouldings and a top and bottom and four legs. I quickly skirt over this because at this distance in time there is, frankly, very little that I remember about the construction of the job. Tom managed it with such ease that there is very little to remember, except how well it all went together.

In the summer, when the piece was going together, my garden was full of clematis and roses and I was very tempted by these. But it was the Aquilegia that really caught my eye. Here the shape of the foliage perfectly compliments that of the bell—shaped flowers. I wanted a design that was fresh and unsentimental. When faced with so beautiful an object, it is difficult to free yourself from the tyranny of the object in front of you. In this case the change of scale was helpful. The Aquilegia flower is tiny, my designs were many times larger than that. Compared with the delicacy and sensitivity of the flower the drawings were quite brash, but I hope they have an asymmetrical balance that is interesting.

The idea of marquetry is that one can inlay a design in one wood into the background of another wood. The beauty of the marquetry donkey is that it allows you to saw the two pieces of wood at the same time. From the point of view of the craftsman this is wonderful for it guarantees that piece "A" will fit inside piece "B" and the difference between the two pieces will only be at worst the width of the saw blade. There are clever techniques that will even eliminate that saw cut but I will not go into those now. As I say all I wanted was a reasonably good fit.

In order to cut the veneers, Tom would assemble what is called a pad. The pad would be a bundle usually the size of the entire panel that was being made or a section of the design. It would be made up of several layers of veneers depending on what the design required. I think in any one pad Tom would have had eight or nine veneers, sometimes more if we wanted to try one or two different woods for this or that part of the design. These would be taped or pinned together inside a sandwich of either thin plywood or hardboard. The whole lot would be securely taped or pinned together. On the surface of the hardboard would be pasted a photocopy of the design. It was this that was used to guide the saw cuts. As Fred had warned us there are many variables to marquetry cutting, the thickness of the pad that you are cutting, the type of blade that you are using and the speed at which the pad is cut, all need to be balanced in order to cut accurately and smoothly down your line. Tom found that with a pad of eight or nine veneers, sandwiched between hardboard or 4 mm plywood, using a 002 single cut blade he got the best result with a slow, steady saw cut. It was a case of more haste, less

speed for if he went too fast the blade was inclined to snap and if he went too slow the dust would not clear properly from the cut and he lost control of directionHowever, given our limited objectives, I think we were successful. I can certainly begin looking for different ways in which marquetry and inlay can be used to advantage. I don't for a moment want to give the impression that marquetry is easy. Our short excursion into the craft has taught us that it is not. Tom Cornish is a gifted and intelligent craftsman and it took him some time to wrap his mind around the problem but, on the other hand, it is not a craft that should be restricted solely to specialists and shrouded in myth and magic.

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