[Adan] It seems that Wednesday posts somehow seem to end up on Saturday unless I do them on Tuesday... so here's your Wednesday Whatzit, with a little time to spare:
Whatzit?
Clues... hmmmm.  Okay, scale: that's a tiny scrap of wood.  The end section is only ~3/16" x ~5/32"... Oh, who am I kidding, I live in a decimal world: it's 0.185" x 0.145" (...with a hypotenuse thrown in there for good measure.  Feel free to calculate that and submit it with your guess.)  Another clue: it's part of either a product or product prototype that has been discussed here.

Please submit guesses, including object and type of wood, and get in the running for the PRIZE!  Um.  Sorry, still no prize, but anyway, have fun!
 
[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.