Walnuts are most often associated with intelligence, wisdom, and inspiration.

Greek mythology says that Prometheus, an immortal titan who rebelled against Zeus by stealing fire from Mount Olympus, gave a single walnut shell containing all the secrets of human future knowledge to his brother Epimetheus as he left him to create the human race.

Curl is a common figuring of wood. Also referred to as tiger stripe and ripple. Curl is compression grain perpendicularly crossing the face of a board producing alternate stripes of hard and soft board fiber. This phenomenon creates a chatoyancy in the board varying in strength depending on the degree of compression leaving the viewer with the illusion of a three-dimensional surface.

The term derives from the French word “chatoyer”, which means “to iridesce, like a cat’s eye.” If you’ve ever seen the stone tiger’s eye, you get the idea. In woodworking, chatoyance is a similarly striking optical quality in which areas of light and dark grain seemingly shimmer or shift depending on the angle of view.