Antique Bird's Eye Maple Scent Bottle Set

• Bird's Eye Maple - Bird's eye maple is a type of wood that is characterized by its unique, small, round eyes or spots that are scattered throughout the wood. These spots are caused by a genetic defect in the tree, and they give the wood a distinctive, swirling pattern that is highly sought after by woodworkers and furniture makers.
  
  Bird's eye maple is harvested from the hard maple tree, which is native to Northern Europe and North America. The wood is generally pale in colour, with shades of cream, white, or light brown. The bird's eye figure is most seen in hard maple, but it can also be found in other species of maple such as the big leaf maple and silver maple, but hard maple is the most common.
  
  It became fashionable in furniture manufacturing for use as a decorative veneer from the late 18th century to the late 19th century.
  
  As well as furniture making, it is also used in musical instruments such as guitar, drums, and pianos and smaller decorative items such as various type of boxes such as tea caddies and in picture frames.
• Faceting - Faceting is a technique of removing material from a curved surface, to give a series of flat surfaces but retaining the profile of the original surface.
  
  The technique is most commonly associated with diamond cutting where the various cuts used such as rose cut and brilliant cut, add life and sparkle to the stone, whilst at the same time removing as little of the stone as possible.
  
  Faceting by grinding is also used to decorate glass. The stems of many drinking glasses are decorated by cutting a series of flat surfaces on a circular stem, and hollow vessels such as vases may have faceted surfaces.
  
  In furniture faceting is often applied to legs of tables and chairs, where a circular baluster shaped section is flattened so as to form an octagonal section.
• Maple - Maple, native to North America, is a dense heavy timber from light to yellow-brown in colour. It has very little distincive graining unless it is one of the variants such as birds-eye maple or burr maple, so was not used extensively for furniture in 18th and 19th century, where cabinetmakers and designers preferred timbers with more distinctive features such as mahogany, walnut, rosewood and oak.
  
  Birds-eye maple has a seres of small spots linked by undulating lines in the grain, is highly sough and is used as a decorative veneer. Burr maple has larger and irregular grain swirls than birds-eye maple.

This item has been included into following indexes:

• perfume / scent bottles, period - Victorian 470