Intarsia Pattern Tip

I'm here to talk to you about intarsia. Intarsia is a three-dimensional woodworking art form. It uses all different sizes, depths of wood. They all need to fit together just like a puzzle. Smaller pieces, like in here in the wings, right where these tails connect, where the wood connects to the bird, or the pine cones, up here in the top, connect into the bow, can be very tough things when you're transferring a paper pattern to the wood. Here I have a big pattern. I've kept one copy, so I know where all these pieces go. I've also cut them into smaller pieces and put them with their like parts and colors that I want to use, whether it's a light piece of wood, a dark piece of wood, or somewhere in between. What I'm gonna show you today is how to put this pattern directly to the piece of wood. One way would be to trace it. Tracing the line from one piece of wood to the next piece of wood can help you to wander outside of it. And when you cut that same line on different pieces of wood, they may not fit together so well. So it's very definitely not your best choice. The second choice would be to spray adhesive directly onto your wood piece and then put the pattern on top of that. That's an okay choice, but it's very time-consuming to take that pattern back off. The third way would be to take a piece of contact paper, just like you'd use for shelving in your cabinets and spray it with some contact adhesive and put your pattern to that. You wanna spray on the clear side, so that you can take the backside off and still be able to see where you are. I'm actually gonna take a scissors and cut around this, so it's a little bit smaller and easier to deal with it. It peels off real easy from the back. Now it gives you a couple of nice things. You can place it... You can see the arrow on my pattern. You can place it directionally with your wood. I've got some color variation that I'd like to highlight. So I'm gonna take my pattern and line it so it's partially on and partially off. If I wanted to have it darker or use a different piece of the wood, I can easily take my pattern piece, get some different color. Easily done. This is the best way that I've found to stick a pattern on intarsia project.