Over the last few months I have been making an oak carved tray with glass insert. It was made from a solid piece of oak, carved with rope edging and straps. To say I am now ‘roped out’ is an understatement. The textures elements to the twisted strands took a long time but they do add a lot of movement to the piece and help make it look more realistic.
You can see my template piece of rope in the earlier pictures below, which helped me work out how the twists moved as they went around the corners. They don’t move how you might think, as the twists tighten on the inside and open up on the outside, so you just need to go with the measurements, and know that it will look right. This is how it finished up:
I have written about the tray in the past, but here is a series of pictures showing how it developed from a plank, through a simple solid cylinder around the tray, on to the carving of the rope shape. I had 3 attempts at getting the curve right around the corners, using my piece of rope and a plastic template with the curls marked out on it. Remembering to leave enough wood to make the straps:
The glass insert was made a few months ago. I used real ferns, with glass powder, to produce the fern design on white background. It takes 3 firings to make the glass insert. I wrote about it at the time.
