Annual End-of-year Card for 2024

[Frank Pellow]

For the ninth year in a row, I plan to send out wooden "Christmas" cards in December. 

Here are photos of the cards from previous years:

.

This year, my cards are being created from a Steve Good pattern that I modified a little bit. It's a four-layer scene that I'm cutting from 3mm-thick Baltic Birch plywood.

I'm going to create 40 cards.  Here is a photo of the glue-up of 12 of the cards that I have cut and painted:

I'm gluing and clamping these one layer at a time then letting the glue dry for at least an hour.  This is a background activity that will continue for many days.

 

[rjweb]

Very nice, will keep you busy for a while, RJ

[Frank Pellow]

Steve Good's 'Multi Level Christmas Dome' pattern suggests four 6mm thick layers which is close to one inch thick.  I need to mail most of these and several to other countries.   Therefore, I reduced the width to be half of what Steve suggested.  With Steve's design, a base to  hold the dome upright could be optional.  My thinner dome, could easily topple over without a base.  I designed my "cards' so that each card has two 6mm thick tennons and designed a base with both a groove to hold the dome upright plus two mortices to capture the tennons.  This is depicted in the dome and base on the left-hand side in the photo below:

I made 4 domes and 4 matching bases.  

The dome and the base need to be mailed, unassembled, in a flat envelope:

Having tested the prototype, I carried on and made 24 additional domes with notches.  Next, I started in on the bases.  Making bases with mortices in exactly the right spot proved to be quite time-consuming.  I decided that the notches, altough they provide a firmer assembly, could be eliminated.  The groove in the base is good enough.  That is what is shown on the right-hand side of the first photo.

I've now made 12 domes without tennons and am about to cut the (labouriously made) tennos off 24 domes.

 

 

 

[JTTHECLOCKMAN]

Brings back memories of a great scroller and great person Carter Johnson who use to scrollsaw puzzles and at Christmas use to send stamp puzzles out. His way of enjoying the holidays. He use to also cut Christmas cards into puzzles. Very talented. He always scrolled in secret objects in the puzzle and you can only recognize them when fully made from the back side. Very cool. 

[Mike Crosa]

I remember Carter well, sorry to hear he has passed.  He sent me one of his postage stamp puzzles.  Wish I could find it but after two moves it got lost in the shuffle.

 

Mike

[JTTHECLOCKMAN]

23 minutes ago, Mike Crosa said:

I remember Carter well, sorry to hear he has passed.  He sent me one of his postage stamp puzzles.  Wish I could find it but after two moves it got lost in the shuffle.

 

Mike

Same here. Have no idea where that wound up. 

[Frank Pellow]

My timing on this project was very bad.

No sooner did I have about  35 of these ready to mail, than the Canadian Postal Workers went out on strike.

I'm visiting the USA in a couple of weeks and I can mail about 10 of the "cards" from there (those with European and USA addresses).  I can hand deliver about 10, but that sitll leaves me about 15 "cards" that need to be mailed.