I’ve been working on a project to learn how to inlay tile into wood. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the best way to do it, but here’s what I did.

First, I marked off the area where the inlay would go and cut the edges with a utility knife.

Then I used a router to take out most of the wood in the inlay area (but didn’t go all the way to the edge).

Next I used a chisel to remove the rest of the wood to the edge. This still left a fair amount of rough wood though, so after that I used a Dremel to take out more.

Finally, I sanded it out, stained and varnished. Here’s the final product:

It was a lot of work, and the results aren’t perfect, but like most things, I’ll probably get better as I do more of this.