Snow in Africa

The evolution of a special requested rosette. These days I am all about a simple rosette but sometimes it is nice to have an exception. I was asked to build a guitar that takes inspiration from Africa and Snow White the tale. Both distinctly different but both meaningful to the client who also was the one to suggest the wooden mosaic as it reminded him of African motives. And while thinking about this idea I decided to try and use only wood species of African origin like Padouk, Bubinga, Madagaskar rosewood, Khaya, Black Limba and African Ebony. 

After looking for and selecting materials and making sure they are all roughly about the same thickness I started with cutting small irregular pieces and glued them together with a (not African) maple veneer. I use a scrap piece of hardboard covered with packaging tape for the assembly. This has several advantages. I will trace the size I want the rosette to have which helps to keep track of where to put each piece and not spent time working on corners that later are outside the rosette. I will join the pieces with Titebond first which does not stick to the tape. Now I`ll be working my way around creating a full circle of various shapes and colours. Once the circle is done it can rest for the glue to dry and then gets covered with thin viscosity cyanoacrylate. This helps to stabilize the rosette but also, and this is another benefit of the tape, it sticks the rosette onto that scrap piece so that I can now put it through the drum sander and get one side sanded flat easily. 

Removing the sanded rosette from the scrap piece is fairly easy to do after cutting the mosaic into a perfect ring with my circle cutter. I will then install the rosette in several steps starting with the mosaic ring first, then adding the purfling lines later and finishing this one off with pearl even. The white macassar pearl has a nice icy effect to remind of Snow white and therefore this rosette even got a title of its own: "Snow in Africa".