OK. To answer a few questions.
1. The first 2 I make I was using black steel wood and after doing the inlay fill with both azurite and torquiose. you could barly see the inlay not enough contrast in colars.
2. The process starts with Ken cutting the pattern as deep as he can with one pass. I turned the blanks down to just slightly oversized be fore I sent them to him. Then remount the blanks then fill pattern with very fine cushed stone and thin ca. I worked my way around the barrel repeating stone then ca until entire pattern had at least some stone. I repeated this process twice more until basically the entire barrel was cover with stone and ca. Turning every thing down is the tricky part (at least for me). The stone gets very hard. I used a carbide tip tool (the one they sell on e-bay, I forget the name). When I was using hhs tool I was not very successful. But with the carbide tipped tool it cut great.