update from the scroll shoppe

Another good pattern from Steve Good. Bless his heart he keeps cranking out free patterns almost daily on his blog and I find I use about 85 to 90% of them. Keep up the good work buddy.

This little heart pendant measures about two inches high and 2 inches wide. Steve made his just a bit smaller. I enlarged it about 10% to accommodate a 1/16th drill bit for the tiny spaces.
This one is cut from 1/8th inch bloodwood. Bloodwood is pretty pricey but I got some scraps free from a friend a couple of years ago and have made projects with them sparingly. I'll probably make about 7 or eight of these and sell them for $5.00 each, If I can part with them. I tend to get attached to my projects and sometimes I hate to see them go. But I know they'll have good homes and the money will allow me to buy materials and supplies to make more.

Well the title of this post says it is to be an update on what's going on in the scroll shoppe so here goes:

Been very busy lately but not all in the shop. My other life keeps intruding and the past couple of weeks have been filled with a lot of announcing jobs (yes by day he's a humble mild mannered scroll saw artist working to turn out beautiful crafts for the community. He seems not unlike Gepetto hoping for one of his creations to come to life. THEN BY NIGHT HE DONS THE MANTLE OF HIS ALTER EGO AND BECOMES....ARENA SPORTS ANNOUNCER MAN. INSPIRING YOUNG ATHLETES TO GIVE CHAMPIONSHIP PERFORMANCES WITH HIS ENTHUSIASTIC PRAISE FOR THEIR EFFORTS.) Have two hockey games this weekend and a couple of college basketball games coming up.

During the evenings I'm home I have been trying to work on the website with the website builder at Go Daddy. I find it a bit daunting especially when the directions offered in the start up manual don't work. Looks like I'll be going back to the support desk for help.

Working now on a project for a friend at work. It's going to be a plaque commemorating their wedding. It is a big fetwork heart wall hanging with their names and wedding date scrolled into it. Designed the pattern in Inkscape. Now it's just a matter of getting it onto the wood and cutting it out.

Well that's the post for now. As an old scroller once said: "Keep the dust blowin and the smiles showin"

The Website is Under Construction!

I am happy to announce I have taken the first steps toward getting a website online. Recently I registered the domain name terrysscrollshoppe.com and signed up with "Go Daddy" for hosting. I'm ready to start building some pages.

I spent some time last night with Go Daddy support. They are pretty good, I must say, and the thing that really sold me on them is that they keep all their technical support right here in the United States. I hate to sound jingoistic about this but far to many companies today farm out their call center jobs to foriegn countries where poorly trained people who barely speak English try to help you solve whatever problem you have. Yes..."Peggy" is real and he is just as hard to understand as it looks on tv.

One of the things I learned talking to Go Daddy Support is that I have a lot to lear. Fortunately they make it pretty easy for you. They offer a lot of templates to choose from and step by step instructions on how to go about it. I am pretty confident I can do this and have a pretty good looking website where you'll be able to view my work, purchase products and link to this blog as well.

First step is planning and putting together a really good home page. I'll probably use the image you see at the top of the page here as the banner and there will be some pictures of some projects I've done along with my saw and maybe a couple of me actually cutting something.

I'll be making a products page with picutres of projects you can order along with their prices and a link to an order form. Most likely will use Paypal for transactions.

Also hope to have an "about" page where I can post some videos of the scroll saw process. A lot of people don't really understand what goes into a scroll sawn piece and this will give them an idea.

There is a lot to do and it looks a bit daunting at first until I actually sit down to do it.
Hope to have the first pages up by the end of the month.

A Painting Option for "Hearts in Love".

After deciding that the "Hearts in Love" cutting just looked too plain in raw wood I was looking

for a way to paint it without losing the character of the wood so I went back to the magazine

article to see what the original designer did and came up with this creative option.

You notice the inside of the letters are painted and the outside wood is left natural. To accomplish this I started by covering both sides of a piece of poplar with blue painters tape and then affixing the pattern to that. I then cut out the piece and before removing the tape I spay painted the edges and inside the letters with a bright red. Then I took some gold paint and added just a light mist for accents. The gold paint came out a little gloppy but it still left a

very nice effect. After it dries you just peel the paint off and you see the end result.

My test market ladies a worked loved it. I sold one immediately and may have some more orders soon. One of my friends suggested to try some other color combinations such as purple and silver or navy blue and gold. I like the idea and may try it out with some other word art.

People really seem to like the word art. Certain phrases touch certain chords in their lives and some of it makes them laugh. It seems to sell better than anything else I am currently doing.

It is also something I can design myself with my Inkscape vector drawing program. Soooo if you

happen to think of any two to four word sayings of phrases post them in the comments section and we'll see what happens.

Fretwork Hearts

These lovely fretwok hearts were designed by Allison Tanner of Sarasota, Florida. They weren't hard to cut by they took a long time, about an hour and a half each including preparation.
I cut them from 1/4 inch Baltic birch plywood and they measure 5 1/4 inches at their widest by
31/2 inches.

I was looking for some way to add color to these without painting them when my wife came up with the idea of threading red ribbons through them. It seems to work pretty well.

Price point for these will be in the neighborhood of $10 each. Allison has several more patterns of these in the current issue of Scroll Saw Woodworking and Crafts. Will be trying a couple more before Valentines Day. Right now have just these four in stock.

To Paint or Not to Paint--That is the questions

Whether tis better to add a splash of color or leave well enough alone and let the customer add their own unique touch of flair.

This lovely little bit of word art is actually a statement. Can you tell what it says. "Hearts in love" is it's simple statement. It is a pattern by toni burghout and Sue Chrestensen published in a June 2008 edition of "Creative Woodworks and Crafts" magazine. In their design they painted just the outside edges or cut edges of the pattern in a bright red accented with gold.
Looking at their results I might try it. I'll post my results as well. It requires some elaborate masking but I think it can be done.

Another idea I had was to paint the hearts red or pink and spray the rest white. Several options
to try. Gotta get busy.

My First Box

Back in the Summer I bought a few one inch thick boards with the idea of trying some small boxes. I kept waiting for a pattern I couldn't resist and finally this month my scroll saw friend Steve Good posted this free pattern on his blog site.

The top and bottom of the box are pieces of quarter inch cherry and the walls are made from a single piece of one inch soft maple.

This one is a prototype I won't sell but now that I have attempted it and learned a few things in

doing it I am going to make a few more to sell.

By far, the most time consuming part is the fretwork in the lid. The walls and bottom took only minutes to cut out.

The glue up is a bit tricky. You must get the inner walls in exactly the right place or the top and bottom won't line up properly when you put it together. I used E-6000 glue. It's kind of like

super glue. It sets quickly and is pretty strong.

Getting the outer walls to fit over the inner walls is a bit tricky also. Sometimes it is necessary to sand the inside of the outer walls with a drum sander on the drill press.

The finish is a coating of Danish Oil and a sealing finish of spray lacquer on top of that.

I like this little box and I'm looking forward to making more in the near future. Obviously this is a Valentines Day project so I need to get going on it.

I see this box selling for between ten and fifteen dollars.

More Valentines Day Projects to come.

Happy New Year, Terry's Scroll Shoppe is Back

The blog has returned. You are looking at the theme for the new year "Create Your Dream". Time to take the Scroll Shoppe to the next level, "on-line" sales. A top priority for this year will be building and maintaining a top notch website for the business. It should be a neat trick because I know NOTHING about website design and creation. I know what I want, just not how to go about putting it together and putting it on line.

I had a freind's brother design my voiceover website. It was quite simple but it took him four months to do it and I don't have that long to get it up and going. So I need to look for a designer around here that can do one for a reasonable amount of money. Or I may look at Go Daddy and see if it is possible to do it myself.

Here's what the site will have. A home page with pictures and information about what I do here. Tabs along the side with categories of projects. Pages on those tabs with pictures and prices for the various projects. Shopping cart capability for ease of ordering. Payment probably using pay pal.

Some sites I have looked at that I admire and would like to emulate include Tuliptree Crafts,

Sheila Landry Designs, 8x10 woodworking, and Scroll Saw Goodies.

This has been a dream for a long time and today is January 1st so it's time to get going and

"Create Your Dream".