Quilted Maple Veneer

Quilted maple is bigleaf maple — Acer macrophyllum, from the Pacific Northwest — carrying large, billowing pockets of figure that swell and roll across the surface. It is the biggest in scale of the maple figures and the one with the most depth, and a good piece looks like a photograph of moving water.

The cut is what makes it. Quilt shows fully on the flat cut or the rotary, where the knife passes across the swollen fibers; quartering it cuts through the quilt at the wrong angle and largely destroys the effect. If a drawing says "quartered quilted maple", something has gone wrong upstream and it is worth a phone call.

The figure also moves. Chatoyance means the light and dark reverse as you walk past, so a photograph or a small sample consistently understates it — and a book-match will mirror that movement across the seam. Ask for a sample large enough to walk past. Available raw, two-ply, paper-backed, and pressed to panel.