Wel, I happened to have brought back a small bag of sugar white sand from Seaside FL from our last trip down, so I can justify financing a trip (although we are already daydreaming abut our next visit). I've played around with some shading using some highly striped anegre to make "ribbons" on some small music boxes (using hand crank music works I found at a now defunct toy store at the beach). I have some tiger maple veneer and just got three pieces of nice satinwood from Certainly Wood. I'll play with that over the weekend and see how it goes. I found several sheets of soemthing with a "bees wing" type figure that I plan on using for the table top. It is beautiful stuff. I'm sure I bought it on ebay, but darned if I can figure out what it is! Maybe I'll post a pic and see if anybody recognizes it. Nice stuff whatever it is. I've got a sample glued down with two coats of poly on it and it is really something. The satinwood I got isn't as nice as the last batch, but it is still not bad.
Tony