George’s Handmade Gifts

I have to be really careful about showing stuff I'm making when I'm making it specifically as Christmas gifts, 'cause I don't want the secret to get out of the bag. But at this point, Santa has delivered all of this stuff. So now you get to see what I had previously done. So here's what I want to do here. I'm gonna walk you through some of the gifts I have made for Christmas. And maybe from that, you'll get some ideas about gifts you can make for Christmas or birthdays or Father's Day or Mother's Day or whatever's coming up on your calendar. First off, let's have a look at this plaque. I cut this on the CNC. My sister had breast cancer and subsequently, as a breast cancer survivor, has done the Susan Komen Walk 11 times. So I wanted to commemorate that for her with this. CNC work, pretty cool. But what I really like about this is I was able to find a pink dye that I could put into what's called casting resin. And I used that to fill the breast cancer label or ribbon. And I also used it to put some color into the letters as well, so everything would really pop from the maple. So obviously the plaque is idiosyncratic to my sister Ann, but the concept of a commemorative plaque, also, the idea of a tone, a colored resin, to help accent everything, especially when we want pink for breast cancer in here. So pink dye for the resin in order to make that jive with the theme. That's for my sister. Now, these babies. I love how they came out. These are Bluetooth speakers. And I have connected them to my phone, one of them. And the sound off of these is actually really good. Great for maybe not my 3,600 square foot shop, 'cause the place is so big, but for an office or a bedroom, they're wonderful. The speaker kits themselves are sold by Rockler. And you get a speaker. And then you also get the connector part of this. So this is where you charge it. It's obviously got a battery onboard. And there's an on off switch as well. All you really need is an inch and 7/8 hole in something, and then you can put those two components in. I chose to make these boxes. And I think what's neat about this is that the boxes are so unique. A great way to use tiny pieces of wood. In this case, spalted maple and Paducah. Curly maple and rosewood. Curly maple and walnut. And then all of the tops are figured ash. That's actually a veneer. So a really neat way to use tiny bits of wood and get what I think is a really amazing looking little speaker box. Very, very simple project to make. But I think has a lot of gee-whiz effect when it's done. This is another CNC project. A gingerbread man cookie tray or candy dish. What I did for this was I went out on the worldwide interwebs and I found a gingerbread man. Brought that shape into VCarve, and that gave me the outside and the face and the buttons. And then I created a wall thickness of a little over an 1/8 of an inch, hollowed this out. Told the ToolPath to put the buttons in the bottom of it. And there we have it. A long machine time. It took quite a while for it to hollow the inside out. But one of the beauties of CNC is that you can press the go button and go do other stuff in your shop. And something that, to look at this and say, well how would I do this in the absence of a CNC, to try to pattern cut this with a router or something, it would be really tough. So a great little CNC project, and a nice thing when you're looking for like a commodity gift for Christmas. In other words, something that you want to make a bunch of to give a number of different people in your life. This is a great item for that. These are made from walnut. In all honesty, I was looking for mahogany. It would have been a little better gingerbread man color, but I didn't have any. So I went with walnut instead. These are kitchen knives that are going to my daughter. And here's the deal with these. The knife blanks are available from Woodcraft Supply and they have a variety of shapes and price points and styles. I have found these to be really good quality steel. I've got a couple of these in my own kitchen. They sharpen easily. They hold an edge really well. What happens is that you buy the steel blank and they look very much like this when you get them. And then you make the wooden handle to go with them. So it's a really nice gift. It's a really inexpensive way to get a really good quality knife in somebody's kitchen. And it's also neat that you can customize them. So because these are together as sort of a set, I did kind of an inverse thing with the handles. This is curly maple with a bloodwood stripe, and this is bloodwood with a maple stripe. So they can kind of contrast each other when they're in the kitchen. The other thing I did in the handles is there's a fiber material you can buy from knife making places. And that's the red that you see here, is red fiber. And then the white that you see here is white fiber. So same idea. It just kind of keeps the theme going of bloodwood with white accents, maple with red accents. A couple of different sources for the stuff that I've purchased to make these gifts. And hopefully this will give you a handful of ideas to launch you on your way for handmade gifts in your shop, 'cause that's a really cool way to do gift giving I think, is to make it yourself.