Christmas Presents!

Yes this is after Christmas but since people who the gifts were made for could possibly see this I have waited till they have all been delivered before posting this. Any way I made a bunch (7) of these Joy free standing plaques. The pattern is from Scroller the sister site to The Winfield Collection which I made the Huge Joy which is 10 Feet tall. Click the word Scroller to be taken to the pattern web page. Now this pattern is a downloadable one. You end up with a PDF of the pattern. So you get it as soon as you pay. They have just started having this feature recently. I much prefer PDF to paper any day of the week.

Anyway I used Curly Maple for Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus. I use Poplar for JOY and I just stained the Joy portion to get three different wood colors going. The stain was Medium Walnut Danish Oil for Joy. I used Natural Danish Oil for both the Curly Maple and the base which ish Pine.

This I consider my foray into shaping wood. I do want to get started doing Intarsia and I figured if I rounded over the letters in a way that would be like doing Intarsia. Well not really but I used my Dremel to do the initial round over with a course sanding sanding drum. Then went on to hand sand with different grits till it was smooth and no scratches from sanding.

Here are the pictures. Here are 6 of them lined up

Now just one

Now just the bottom showing my branding. Speaking of this I can tell you how I made this branding. I read about this and made my own way to do this that was cheap. I created the logo in Inkscape and then I can make it what ever size I want in relation to the project it is for. I then have a special sheet of paper that I created by taping wax paper to an actual piece of paper. I then put that in my inkjet printer and print it. The ink will not dry right away on the wax paper so you have time to take the wax paper and place it on your project and the ink is absorbed right into the wood and does not smudge. You could in reality print in color and it would work just fine but choose your colors wisely in relation to the wood color. Always remember when you do create the logo you need to reverse the image because you will get the reverse of what ever it is you print. So if I did not reverse the image before printing it would come out backwards. Any way here is the logo I use.

Now all that is left is to wrap them and bring them with me to visit family and hope they like them!

Here is the Huge Joy Sign I made 3 years ago in 2014. It took 3 full sheets of plywood to do and it is 10 feet tall.

Thanks for checking out my site and following along with me.