The rossette serves both an aesthetic purpose as well as a structural purpose for reinforcing the soundhole.
The procedure to make a rossette starts with the sticks.
Then the sticks are arranged into a pattern that is glued together to become a board.
Then they are glued into a set of boards that will combine into some pattern.
The boards are then glued together into a log that will have the desirde pattern as the cross section.
The cross section is sliced out of the log in the following manner...
Then the rossette channell is excavated by first cutting out the inner and outer perimeters of the hole.
Then a chisel is used to remove material between the lines that were cut at the precise depth of 1/16 inches.
After a few hours the cut is looking decent enough...
Where the tiles shall go...
A test fit of the tiles with the outer and inner design patterns.
The rossette being glued into place by doing a small section at a time.
After the glue dries, the rossette is planed down to level with the soundboard surface.
The last few thousandths of an inch are scraped away with a razor.
This is what the almost finished rossette looks like. The gap will be covered by the fingerboard, so there is no need for rossette where the sun don't shine.
This is the finished rossette, with a piece of mahagony inlaid where the gap existed.
And finally the soundhole is cut out.
Next: Soundboard