I like that a lot!

Hi Chad, your design is good, and I could offer a little constructive criticism here if your open to it. A couple things I'll point out are these, your tapers look good, much better than many I've seen as it's evident your effort is there, if you would taper the wire a bit more and lengthen it just a bit off of the main stem it would be top notch, second, your volutes (curved fiddleheads) have flat spots rather than smooth curves. A lot of times this happens when folks use to wide of a cutting tool, and last, your inlaying tool appears to be blunt, or not sharp enough to be cutting on the cross grain curves as it's crushing the fibers rather than cutting them, and that very difficult to mask over with finish. Please don't get me wrong and take offense to these observations, I only meant to help, and it took me a lot of practice to work through many aspects of this art and I still have a long way to go myself. I don't have a website to speak of and I don't know if you do FB but I have a business page showing some of my work, under wilderness knife and forge, but as I said before, my stuff is not perfect, but you will be able to see some of what I was talking about. Wes

For an early attempt, you did great. I have not tried I laying wire yet but I have a project coming up that calls wire inlay ed into wrought iron. Thanks for sharing.

Chris

Hey thanks Wes. I definitely knew the problems I was having , but wasn't sure how to fix them (except the tapers). So thanks for speaking up. I'm glad you took the time to look over my work and give me some feedback. I checked your work out,.. pretty sweet. Thanks again.

There are certainly lots of aspects of this that will get better each time you do inlay.

Another thing to do is to actually cut in and create BOTH portions of an intersection BEFORE you put any wire in. Use a wide chisel to cut ACROSS a run first, then come back and connect to that later.

There is just really no way you can perfectly line up a run of wire by trying to line up the cuts on each side of a run.

Thanks Karl. I obviously have not been doing that, but I will give it a shot on the next one. I just assumed that by cutting a run across another, it might "clog" up the intersection. But I will practice and see if I can get it to work for me. I definitely appreciate all the help from everybody.

Chad, you would be sort of right about clogging if your tool were crushing fibers down rather than cutting and spreading, and if your tool were not incising the same depth for the wire. A perfect crossing line looks good on your flatter surfaces unless your going for the slight three dimensional aspect, plus many times your wire will be flowing around the curvy contours of a knife handle. There are so many techniques for wire work it's crazy. I've been able to study first hand some of the Russian,French, and Belgian inlay artwork from the seventeen hundreds, and it's amazing to the point that I haven't seen anything near it's artistic equal to date, but it gives me a goal to strive for.

Wes. I think that my tools are sharp and I'm wondering if its my technique. I rock the edge from the last plunge to the next and perhaps its the edges of my tool doing the crushing. Not sure, just a thought. How do YOU sharpen yours? They are so small. I hate that crushed look, so I want to get this solved. I appreciate the help.

What are your cutting chisels made of?

My chisels are made from XACTO knives.