To understand the whys of the question, I have to first tell a small story. Well, a story with a short preface.
The Preface: Met my wife 20 years ago in high school, dated a little while, parted ways, got married 15 or 16 years later after living in different states for most of that time with little contact.
The Story: We're at the Central Washington State Fair a couple years ago, and I noticed that, no matter what barn or building we were in, she always gravitated to the ugliest, most pathetic, most horrific, most wretched looking creatures in the building. The ugliest, scrawniest cow? That was the one she thought was "soooo cute." In the reptile barn? The nastiest, scaliest, ugliest lizard was, to her, "so beautiful." At Xmas she always wants to go for the Charlie Brown tree, four feet tall with three branches and seven needles. That, of course, is when I realized exactly how I'd managed to bag this beauty. She looked around at all the available suitors, and picked the most pathetic, most wretched looking one of the bunch, me.
And don't get me wrong, I ain't arguing with it. Take what you can get and ask for seconds. But all of this is only to shed light on:
The Knothole Question: I picked up for cheap the other day a sizable piece of beautiful walnut, one foot by three feet. An inch thick. Cheap because at one end is a humongous knot. The knot itself is probably three or four inches across, maybe a little more. The knothole itself is probably, give or take, an inch and a half across.
So I was showing my wife my smart purchase, saying, I can cut around that knot, and that still leaves a whole lot of nice looking walnut to use for trim or small boxes or whatever. "Well, what are you going to do with that knot?" she says. "It's really beautiful." I made the Tim Taylor "Arrrrooooo?" noise, then pretty much forgot about it until she mentioned it again the next day. And again a few days later. That's when I started trying to come up with a project, any project, that would prominently feature a big-ass knothole. Apart from a paperweight, I came up with nothing, so I'm throwing it out to the experts.
Any thoughts?