walnut brick style cutting board

End-grain cutting board, brick style, glue-up cured and trimmed flat. Walnut bricks with hard maple lines for the mortar. Pattern came from a sketch on graph paper, scaled up to the size of my standard blanks. First pass through the planer is the moment the picture finally locks in: the maple grids snap straight, the walnut blocks read clean, any little misalignment from the glue-up planed away. Still needs sanding through 320 and a long soak in mineral oil. End-grain is murder on knife edges in the bad way and kind to them in the good way. That's the whole point of all this extra work.