Inlay in the context of "Federal furniture"

Pearl hunting, also known as pearl fishing or pearling, is the activity of recovering or attempting to recover pearls from wild molluscs, usually oysters or mussels, in the sea or freshwater. Pearl hunting was prevalent in India and Japan for thousands of years. On the northern and north-western coast of Western Australia pearl diving began in the 1850s, and started in the Torres Strait Islands in the 1860s, where the term also covers diving for nacre or mother of pearl found in what were known as pearl shells.

In most cases the pearl-bearing molluscs live at depths where they are not manually accessible from the surface, and diving or the use of some form of tool is needed to reach them. Historically the molluscs were retrieved by freediving, a technique where the diver descends to the bottom, collects what they can, and surfaces on a single breath. The diving mask improved the ability of the diver to see while underwater. When the surface-supplied diving helmet became available for underwater work, it was also applied to the task of pearl hunting, and the associated activity of collecting pearl shell as a raw material for the manufacture of buttons, inlays and other decorative work. The surface supplied diving helmet greatly extended the time the diver could stay at depth, and introduced the previously unfamiliar hazards of barotrauma of ascent and decompression sickness.

The Shrine of Saint Lachtin's Arm (known in Irish as Lámh Lachtaín) is an early 10th-century Irish arm-shrine type reliquary made of wood and metal shaped as an outstretched forearm and clenched fist. St. Lachtin's dates to between 1118 and 1121 and is associated with his church in the village of Stuake, Donoughmore, County Cork, but probably originates from Kilnamartyra, also in Cork. It consists of a yew-wood core lined with decorated bronze and silver plates. The wood at the hand is hollowed out to create a reliquary cavity which once held the arm bone of St. Lachtin (b. 526, County Cork) but is now empty. The circular cap at its base contains a large transparent gemstone and is inlayed with silver decorated with filigree.

The shrine is 39 cm high, 7 cm wide and 7 cm deep. Because the hand is clenched rather than, as is more usual for arm shrines, open as if in the act of blessing, it may have functioned as battle standard or talisman to protect or heal combatants. Saint Lachtin's Arm was rediscovered by antiquarians c. 1750, having been in the care of its hereditary keepers, the Healy family, for around 200 years. It was acquired that year from Donoughmore Church by the art collector Andrew Fountaine. Thereafter, it passed through various private and public collections and has been in the collection of the archaeology branch of the National Museum of Ireland (NMI), Dublin, since 1890.

The Gundestrup cauldron is a richly decorated silver vessel, thought to date from between 200 BC and 300 AD, or more narrowly between 150 BC and 1 BC. This places it within the late La Tène period or early Roman Iron Age. The cauldron is the largest known example of European Iron Age silver work (diameter: 69 cm (27 in); height: 42 cm (17 in)). It was found dismantled, with the other pieces stacked inside the base, in 1891, in a peat bog near the hamlet of Gundestrup in the Aars parish of Himmerland, Denmark (56°49′N 9°33′E / 56.817°N 9.550°E / 56.817; 9.550). It is now usually on display in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, with replicas at other museums; it was in the UK on a travelling exhibition called The Celts during 2015–2016.

The cauldron is not complete, and now consists of a rounded cup-shaped bottom making up the lower part of the cauldron, usually called the base plate, above which are five interior plates and seven exterior ones; a missing eighth exterior plate would be needed to encircle the cauldron, and only two sections of a rounded rim at the top of the cauldron survive. The base plate is mostly smooth and undecorated inside and out, apart from a decorated round medallion in the centre of the interior. All the other plates are heavily decorated with repoussé work, hammered from beneath to push out the silver. Other techniques were used to add detail, and there is extensive gilding and some use of inlaid pieces of glass for the eyes of figures. Other pieces of fittings were found. Altogether it weighs just under 9 kilograms (20 lb).

Marquetry (also spelled as marqueterie; from the French marqueter, to variegate) is the art and craft of applying pieces of veneer to a structure to form decorative patterns or designs. The technique may be applied to case furniture or even seat furniture, to decorative small objects with smooth, veneerable surfaces or to freestanding pictorial panels appreciated in their own right.

Marquetry differs from the more ancient craft of inlay, or intarsia, in which a solid body of one material is cut out to receive sections of another to form the surface pattern. The word derives from a Middle French word meaning "inlaid work".

The iron Inariyama burial-mound sword (稲荷山古墳出土鉄剣, inariyama kofun shutsudo tekken) or kinsakumei tekken (金錯銘鉄剣) was excavated in 1968 at the Inariyama Kofun, a megalithic tomb located in Saitama Prefecture. In 1978, X-ray analysis revealed a gold-inlaid inscription that comprises at least 115 Chinese characters. This sword was described as the discovery of the century for the study of ancient Japanese history. The sword is designated a national treasure of Japan and is on display in the Saitama Prefectural Museum of the Sakitama Ancient Burial Mounds.

Ancient furniture was made from many different materials, including reeds, wood, stone, metals, straws, and ivory. The furniture was decorated through processes like upholstery, inlaying, and through the use of finials.

It was common for ancient furniture to have religious or symbolic purposes. The Incans had chacmools which were dedicated to sacrifice. Similarly, in Dilmun they had sacrificial altars. In many civilizations, certain types of furniture were reserved for upper-class citizens. Stools and thrones made for nobility in Ancient Egypt were made of fine imported wood, occasionally animal bone, and were painted, gilded, and inlaid with metals. In Mesopotamia, tables were decorated with expensive metals, chairs would be padded with felt, rushes, and upholstery. Some chairs had metal inlays.

Decoupage or découpage (/ˌdeɪkuːˈpɑːʒ/; French: [dekupaʒ]) is the art of decorating an object by gluing colored paper cutouts onto it in combination with special paint effects, gold leaf, and other decorative elements. Commonly, an object like a small box or an item of furniture is covered by cutouts from magazines or from purpose-manufactured papers. Each layer is sealed with varnishes (often multiple coats) until the "stuck on" appearance disappears and the result looks like painting or inlay work. The traditional technique used 30 to 40 layers of varnish which were then sanded to a polished finish.

Three dimensional decoupage (sometimes also referred to simply as decoupage) is the art of creating a three-dimensional (3D) image by cutting out elements of varying sizes from a series of identical images and layering them on top of each other, usually with adhesive foam spacers between each layer to give the image more depth. Pyramid decoupage (also called pyramage) is a process similar to 3D decoupage. In pyramid decoupage, a series of identical images are cut into progressively smaller, identical shapes which are layered and fixed with adhesive foam spacers to create a 3D "pyramid" effect.

Casino chips (also known as poker chips, gaming tokens, or checks/cheques) are small discs used as currency in casinos. Larger, rectangular gaming plaques may be used for high-stakes games. Poker chips are also widely used as play money in casual or tournament games, are of numismatic value to casino chip collectors, or may be kept as souvenirs.

Chips and plaques used in table games may be made of a mixture of metal, clay, ceramic, and plastic materials inlayed or painted with colors and numbers indicating various denominations, while metal token coins are used primarily in slot machines. Some casinos embed RFID tags into chips to collect data and fight counterfeiting, and plaques may have printed serial numbers.

Pietra dura (Italian: [ˈpjɛːtra ˈduːra]), pietre dure ([ˈpjɛːtre ˈduːre]) or intarsia lapidary (see below), called parchin kari or parchinkari (Persian: پرچین کاری) in the Indian subcontinent, is a term for the inlay technique of using cut and fitted, highly polished colored stones to create images. It is considered a decorative art. The stonework, after the work is assembled loosely, is glued stone-by-stone to a substrate after having previously been "sliced and cut in different shape sections, and then assembled together so precisely that the contact between each section was practically invisible". Stability was achieved by grooving the undersides of the stones so that they interlocked, rather like a jigsaw puzzle, with everything held tautly in place by an encircling 'frame'. Many different colored stones, particularly marbles, were used, along with semiprecious, and even precious stones. It first appeared in Rome in the 16th century, reaching its full maturity in Florence. Pietra dura items are generally crafted on green, white or black marble base stones. Typically, the resulting panel is completely flat, but some examples where the image is in low relief were made, taking the work more into the area of hardstone carving.