Drawing multiple openings for things such as divided light windows and doors, cames in leaded glass windows, face frame grids or the latticework on the doors of this antique Chinese cabinet can be a very tedious process. Maybe almost as tedious as making the thing in the shop. It’s one of those things I’ve done in the past entirely manually and wished for an easier method. The other day I was looking at some photos of this old cabinet. I was wondering how I could easily draw the lattice when it occurred to me to try an old plugin called Greeble 2. The plugin was designed add greeble or detailing to larger surfaces to make them appear more complex. I’d played with it a few times some years ago when it was first released but didn’t see it as of much use for woodworking projects.

It is generally easy to identify the centerlines of mullions or face frames. Once you have those in place you could use Offset using half the overall width of the grid pieces. For a couple of openings that wouldn’t be all that difficult. If the patterns is regular as in a typical divided light glass paneled door, you could also use the array function of Move/Copy. But if the pattern is more complex, those methods can be difficult and time consuming. The video shows how I went about making the lattice on this cabinet.

In addition to the Greeble plugin I leverage Edit>Paste in place and the Round Corner plugin to round over the front edges of the grid.

I can think of a number of applications for this process. I’ll leave it up to you to find your own.

–Dave

Note: it was brought to my attention that there’s a plugin called Fixit which can delete the skins over the openings that results from the round over process. It’s much faster than selecting the unwanted faces one at a time.