Well, the client who hired us to do some grain-contrasted inlay using that beautiful piece of sycamore has given us permission to show some of the resulting inlay right here on our Toylog.  Without further ado...
Picture
It's really turned out so beautifully, I love to look at it.  Every single one of those circles is as close to perfect as my eye can distinguish, with no visible glueline... and that's 430 circles!  Getting the tone to match was a struggle, so I made extras in order to be certain he would have enough to work with.
All the circles are quartersawn, and all the substrate is plainsawn.  These will be part of the decorative trim on a pair of desks that are a part of a very fancy railcar restoration project.
 
[Adan] We've just been hired by a local custom furniture builder to do an interesting inlay project.  We're just doing the strips of inlay (two different patterns, multiple strips of each), which he'll then incorporate into the furniture he's building.
sycamore plank awaiting the chop
Yesterday he visited his friends at Jeffries Wood Works, and they sold him this lovely piece of quartersawn sycamore.  He dropped it by Akertoys, and I just fell in love with the thing.  This photo doesn't do it justice... it's just a beautiful piece of wood.  Not super-flashy, no tiger-striped craziness here, just some wood showing its ray structure at its finest.

quartersawn sycamore grain close-up-ish
The other cool thing is the way we'll be doing the inlay: this isn't one of those jobs where you inlay Wood A into a substrate of Wood B (cherry into maple, say).  No, here we'll be celebrating that nice quartersawn grain by using it as Wood A, and inlaying it into the exact same wood on a plain sawn orientation.  Pretty slick.  It'll be subtle, but totally visible.  I can't wait to see it.