Well I've playing around with a different cutting technique lately called Compound Cutting. I hope you can see from these photos that it gives the pieces a dimensional look instead of just a flat pieces of wood. The figures are cut from square blocks of wood about three to four inches long. The magazines that I subscribe to have had a lot of patterns for these compound cuts. I really have been enjoying cutting these which kind of explains the lack of posts in the last month. I have already sold a few of these at work and would like to sell more at bazaars in November. It's kind of funny...when I first started cutting these I spent some time sanding and prepping the surface of my block when it suddenly occurred to me "DUH! The image is coming out of the INSIDE of the block. you don't need to prep the outside SURFACE". These are really interesting and fun to cut and not really very hard at all. The pattern consists of two sides. One side is the profile that gives it dimension and the other is the main image that you see when you look at it front on. You attach the patterns to adjacent faces of the block and clamp the block between a couple of pieces of wood to give you more area for your hands to work. Then you cut out the smaller profile image on one face the block, take it out of the clamp block and put packing tape around it so the piece you cut will not fall out of the block or move around, then you cut the other side of the pattern and push it out of the block and viola! you have a three dimensional image. I have cut mainly small items so far but have seen patterns for goblets, candle sticks and more. I have also cut some very tiny ones as well that I'll show you in a future post.