RabidAlien

I've got an old Dremel 57-2. Saving my pennies to get a DeWalt 788 some day so I can graduate up to 6" blades and all the fun, exciting options that entails.

Regarding cutting letters....most of the answers above apply. Make sure your blade is tensioned properly, and GO SLOW. For smaller projects (like Steve Good's 3D Christmas ornaments, for example), build yourself a jig to hold the letters, so your fingers are on the jig and not anywhere near the running blade. Here's a simple jig I copied from Steve Good's site, just two scrap pieces of wood, drill a hole near each end, run a lag bolt through, then washer/wingnut. I get it good and snug, and can cut right up to where my chubby fingers would be overlapping the edge of the project with no fear of losing skin/blood.

Seasonal heads-up...for those of you who scroll using fresh rounds cut off tree trunks, Lowes (and other places, we were specifically at Lowes though) trims off the bottom inch or two of the fresh Christmas trees they sell, so that there's no hardened sap to keep the trunk from drawing up water. I asked what they did with the rounds, and the guy chuckled and said "you want it? you got it. How MANY do you want?" He had a 5-gallon bucket full of the things. Some of them are lopsided, some are too thin to really do much, some are really thick...but for free, I figure what doesn't get scrolled, can go into a fireplace somewhere. Dunno if you can ask early in the morning and have them save a truckload, or if its first-come-first-served (we stopped by early evening on a Saturday, around 5:30-ish), but hey....free! None of my 5-gallon buckets survived the move this past summer, so we just dumped em in the bed of my truck and I used a couple of plastic bags to gather them up.

Been doing some honey-doos the last day or so (yay. Christmas lights.), so I haven't gotten to post anything I've worked on. So...here's a massive image dump. The sign-language "LOVE" pattern I put together. An early project I did for my wife, waaaaaaaaay back in January according to the date/siggy on the back. One of my first "big" scrolling projects, done from some clipart I'd found online. She loves the mountains, and I was interested to see what all this scroll-saw thing could do (I'd done some band-saw signs previously and used the scroll saw solely to take out the inside loop of scripty letters). This had been hanging in her sewing room without a backer, so I cut one to size and got it glued down. Then had to drill some holes in it to reattach the string hanger, which had previously just been tied around the frame as the whole frame was too thin to drill or hammer into. Looks kinda good under her "my husband has been browsing Steve Good patterns again" shelf. Speaking of Steve Good....we're in a new house, so this Christmas she's indulging herself with a real Christmas tree instead of a plastic one that we can re-use (yeah....call me Scrooge. Got the T-shirt.). So she kinda hinted that I could make some ornaments for it in that way that women have of hinting without there really being any options attached. I told her about some of his 3-D ornaments that I had printed out and was wanting to try, but she wanted something with the date on it. These took about 3 hours total to cut this evening, after hanging Christmas lights and some privacy contact paper on an upper window above the front door (partly to keep the Dane/Bloodhound from laying at the top of the stairs, staring out that window, and barking his fool head off at every sketchy-looking leaf that blows past). May have to risk a trip to Michaels or Hobby Lobby tomorrow to see if they have some sort of white or green metallic/sparkly spraypaint to finish these up.

Aw, man, I hate it when this happens.....looks like they delivered to the wrong address!!! Tell em they can send it to my house..... Have fun with it!

Very nicely done! I love the proper punctuation of "y'all"!!! I have relatives all over the Denton area, including one cousin and her family in Justin.

Behold, the miraculous healing powers of sawdust!!!! Welcome back!

Amazon.com doesn't sell all three?

Heh. I called it quits last night when I moved my blade to a new hole, got everything set and clamped, got my magnifier moved over, hit the power, and then tried to feed the blade.....and it did NOTHING. Almost as if there were a scrap of wood getting caught in the cutout of the table, but even then I'd get a quarter-inch movement before it caught. Tried going in different spots from the guide hole, thinking maybe I'd hit a knot or solid chunk of something, but zero movement whatsoever. So I shut down, released the blade....and realized it was in backwards. *sigh* That's when you know you're done for the evening.

True dat. We've got two Danes and a Dane/Bloodhound mix. Hard to find sitters for them.

Holy crap.....that's AWESOME!!!! I need to check his patterns and see what he considers to be "Expert" level!

MUCH happier with how this version turned out. Rubber bands worked really well for keeping the lettering in line.

Thx!!! I was worrying about how to keep the lettering all aligned since everything is cut apart, then it hit me last night: put a rubber band around the frame where the bottom of the letters will be, put glue on the bottom of the letters, line up with the rubber band, and boom, all aligned. Flashes of genius don't strike me often....and when they do, they make my head hurt. Got requests for two more, though, so this one can't be all that bad. LOL (no such thing as "too many dogs", btw....:))

No worries, everybody learns differently. Me, I need to have something in mind to create or tweak before the lesson really *sticks* for me. For instance, I made it about halfway through the Inkscape tutorials, and the whole time I was sitting there thinking "okay, lets get through this so I can learn how to do wordart!" And I still can't design a vector pattern to save my life. So I just skipped ahead to the bonus wordart tutorial...watched it, and all of a sudden a lot of the other little lessons I'd gone through started making sense (especially all those curves and nodes and Bezier stuff). But I put the lessons into context of something I wanted to learn, and it helped me absorb them better. Will I go back and re-do the previous lessons? Yep. Eventually.

Nabbed it...my wife is a Grinch fan.

Years using Photoshop to tweak photos, back when photography was my hobby (and I had to wait an hour for film to be developed). I also work in IT, so I've seen a lot of the features in various applications...just takes time to get used to where they are. One thing you could do is go through Travis' tutorials, watch one and then spend a week or so just tweaking *that* aspect of photos or wordart or line art or whatever. Just get yourself familiar with it. Then move on to the next. Applications like these are easier to digest one button at a time vs a massive info-dump heres-everything-at-once-good-luck-mortal.

One day, I hope to grow up to be half as good as this. Those are AMAZING!!!! ...gotta grow up, first, my wife says. Pfft, I replied, and called her a poopy-head.

LOVE the Marvin one!!! Great cutting on the zebras!

Comparing Gimp and Inkscape is like comparing MS Word and Adobe Photoshop. Two different purposes, although there are some similarities and crossover. If you know how to crop an image in Photoshop, finding that function in Word (yes...it exists in Word!) doesn't mean you have to relearn how to crop. Just means you know what it does, and are mildly surprised that its in a word-processing application. LOL I use Inkscape for wordart and use Gimp for converting images to patterns.

Alex Fox pattern, cut from 3/8" BB ply. Fun pattern to cut!!! The rattle-can metallic silver didn't show up too well in the photo, but it has a glittery finish to it.

Frame/backer done. Silver done by Krylon rattlecan. Dry-run put the text down to see how it looks, and I gotta admit my wife was right. It looks good this way!

Check your local community college, see if they have anything on marketing design/graphics. They may use specific software (Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, etc), but the fundamentals will be the same across software. A text-box is still a text-box, after all. Once you learn what each button does, how to manipulate various aspects, you can take that knowledge over to ANY program. The only difference will be in how they have the menus and buttons arranged.

Howdy from the Austin area! Biggest I've done was about 14".

Did you click "Run" from the website, or did it just dowdnload? If you clicked "Run" (an option in Internet Explorer), you should be able to find Gimp in the Start menu and create a desktop or taskbar (my preference) shortcut. If you just saved from the website (Chrome or Firefox options), then the download was just the installer, not the actual program. You'll still need to install it. Easy way to tell the difference is to look in the Start menu, or go into your preferences and see if its available for uninstall.

That airplane is the sole reason I found my love of military history. Hated those classes in school, I couldn't ever keep up with the rote memorization of names/dates that it seemed like they wanted. But the P38....loved that plane (and its big brother, the P61 Black Widow!!!). I wanted to know a bit more about it, so I bought a book "The Last Great Ace" about Maj. Thomas McGuire....and that was it. LOL The Pacific air war led to US Marines and island-hopping and Vinegar Joe Stillwell's CBI, then globejumped to the European Theater. But the P38 is always at the front! Love the pattern, love the cut, great frame job as well! Really makes the plane stand out. Is the pattern available?