A finished project (woodworking)

[professionalhenchman]

So, I finally finished a project I'd started over a year ago - I decided that I wanted a project to practice carving in hardwoods, so I made a "geeks live here" sign for the outside of our house. Well, OK, that's not what it says, but that's what it means.
Photos are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahandbrian/5562061739/
and here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahandbrian/5562064247/
(links because I can't seem to get LJ to embed them properly)
I started with Tolkein's illustration of the inscription on the Doors of Durin, then used www.blockposters.com to blow up the image into one that I could print out to span four pages for a ~16"x20" final size. I planed and glued two planks of maple together, then covered them with sheets of carbon paper, stuck the printed illustration on top of that, and traced the illustration with a ball-point pen. After taking away the paper and carbon paper, I was left with my carving lines. Over the course of several months I carved away at the image (between other projects and such), until I had all the carving done. After that, I used a mechanical pencil to darken the lines with graphite, then put several coats of spar varnish over the whole thing. I'm quite pleased with the way it turned out. Sarah suggested rewording the elvish in the arch to read "speak geek and enter", but I'm pretty sure it says that quite well as is.

Comments

[slothphil.livejournal.com]

Nice work.

[groblek.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I had a lot of fun with it.

[whalejudge.livejournal.com]

Now, to get your front door on a voice-activated opening system...

[temperance14.livejournal.com]

It's beautiful. So are the owners.

[kevinbunny.livejournal.com]

Very nice. Of course, now.. for optimal awesome, replace the front door with that. Ithilden is a little tricky to get ahold of, but some iridescent interference paint might work well...

[serendipity17.livejournal.com]

Replacing the front door with a 16" x 20" panel would be sub-optimal.

[whalejudge.livejournal.com]

Well, now that the scale model is finished he can get to work on the full-sized one, right?

[serendipity17.livejournal.com]

The proportions are wrong for full-door use; doors are narrower compared to height.

[whalejudge.livejournal.com]

Groblek has skills, he can adjust.

[groblek.livejournal.com]

Putting it on the door was actually the original plan, but Sarah pointed out that the screen door would block the view most of the time.

[lyahdan.livejournal.com]

Wow! That came out really well.

And yeah, that pretty much telegraphs "here there be geeks," rather well.

[masterfiddler.livejournal.com]

As far as the embedding thing, try going to the picture you want on Flickr, click once on the down arrow next to Share This to get a sub-menu, drop down to the Grab the HTML/BB Code part, check to make certain you have the size you want (usually small or medium will do nicely), then copy and paste into your LJ entry or comment.



If you're really feeling geeky, you can also add the code target="_blank" to have the link open in a new window.