Patt wrote:

Can someone offer tips/advice on doing this.

It's just veneering, only there's more of it and more opportunity for
the same sorts of screw-up. The trick seems to be to combine a good and
practiced veneering technique with dry and stable veneers.

If you sliced branches did you remove the bark first?

I've used laburnum, holly and fruitwoods which had all well-attached
bark. I left this on, bandsawed the slices and then cut them to
rectangles. If the bark was looking dodgy to begin with then I'd remove
it before any drying and slicing, just to make it easier to handle. I
also did some ivy which has relatively thick and wet cambium under the
bark. I always removed this wet, as I had a lot of checking trouble
when drying it otherwise.

How did you dry it?

I air-dried it to "damp" by waxing 6" lengths and ignoring them for a
year, then I sliced it and air-dried the slices in a loosely stacked
flitch for another year. This wasn't to improve drying, but to try and
avoid radial checking.

To veneer it, just read any marquetry book. I use hot hide glue, very
light hammer technique and a vacuum bag. Normally I'm heavy handed with
my hammer and don't need to bag pieces, but for oysters I started to
get paranoid about them shifting around while I was working on them and
screwing up the whole job on the last piece.

Obviously timber movement is a problem. You want your veeneers well dry
before working on them, and the substrate too. I'd air-condition both
in _the_same_environment_ for at least a month before using them. The
biggest problem isn't dryness, it's equality - that's how they're
always going to end up, so best get them there before you stick them. I
was doing some onto lebanon cedar and so there was much perusing of
Hoadley to worry about relative expansion rates.

Only laburnum is worth bothering with, IMHO and even then only if it
has nice two-colour markings. Yew might be nice too. The very plain
fruitwoods and ivy were experiments, the holly wound up slathered under
thick brown treacly spirit varnishes trying to look like antique 18th
century tea caddies and harpsichords. It was still featureless and
masked by the varnishes, but then so are the real pieces these days.

I can't imagine myself ever doing a big case piece like this. It's just
not a nice enough technique. Small boxes are attractive, but too much
and it looks overpowering. For that much effort I can make nicer things.