Hot Date Night and the Arrow of Light!

Long time, no see!

Yeah, it's been crazy busy here at SmileMoon Labs as well as at Chez SmileMoon! Just this past week saw us with our oldest home from school for spring break and me completing a small project for my sons' Cub Scout organization. It was an Arrow of Light display for the crossing over ceremony (Webelos to Boy Scouts) and represents the only badge the scouts are allowed to keep from their Cub Scout days as they progress up the ranks of Boy Scouts.



The finished piece is made from a glued up plank of walnut (42" by 18") for the face of the display (salvaged from award plaques found in a closed down industrial facility) and poplar (purchased specifically for the project) to make the lightbox (40" by 17" by 9"). There's a fluorescent light fixture inside the lightbox, and tapered holes drilled into the top of it for the ceremonial candles. The carving of the design on the face was done freehand with a router from scaled measurements made from the Arrow of Light badge.

The piece was shown at the Arrow of Light ceremony on March 19th and was well received by the leaders and other parents. Sadly, it's been put in storage until next year's ceremony. On the bright side, I've still got one more son in Cub Scouts and one more who may join in the fall, so I'll still get to see the display pulled out and used a few more times.

Date Night

Mrs SmileMoon and I went out this weekend for a bit of a date night at the local watering hole. Neither of us is a huge party animal, and the venue we selected was unusually quiet for a Saturday night, so this suited us perfectly. While we were relaxing with our first Blue Moons, my lovely young bride took a pen out of her purse, and proceeded to set up a game of hangman on her placemat. "Hee hee," thought I! "This should be no problem!" Well, I went down in flames in the first match and she guessed the phrase I'd set up for her with only two wrong guesses.

Before long, the phrases took on a pattern of thought involving many of our pet phrases and (very) brief descriptions of events in our relationship. Phrases like "mushroom swiss burger" (her meal on our first date - unpretentious and showing me she was not afraid to be sloppy in my presence), "skirt of the month" (a fictitious club thought up to celebrate the limited wardrobe of one of our former neighbors), and "giant bandaid" (this would take too long to explain and probably wouldn't be funny to anyone but us, but she still gets tears in her eyes laughing about it 20 years after the fact) were among many of the choices we had to figure out for each other before our greasy comfort food was served.

This was such a funny way to bring up events that we've laughed at in the past, I felt it would be fun to share it as an idea, especially if, like us, you've got a few years invested in your relationship and have more to laugh about than not.

New Listing - Gunstock Wine Bottle Holder

Walnut Gunstock Balancing Wine Bottle Holder
While working on trying to complete some pillboxes that seem to be taking for just about ever, a friend of mine asked if he could 'borrow' my bandsaw to cut up some walnut he had on hand so he could replace the gunstock on his old 1908 Ithaca 12-gauge side-by-side shotgun. He showed me the original wood from the gun, and its 100-plus years of wear were abundantly in evidence. Sections of wood were missing, and bolts were being used to hold some of it together - not at all a safe condition for actually wanting to use the gun.

He traced the general shape onto his walnut and proceeded to coax the block into shape. The woodblock itself was almost twice as thick as what he needed to complete his gunstock, and since the remainder was too thin to make another gunstock, I inherited it and set it aside til I could figure out what to do with it.

This weekend, inspiration finally struck me while I was waiting for the glue to dry on one of those pillboxes. Why not a bottle holder? When I laid out where the hole would have to go in a block of wood the general shape and size of a gunstock, it all just fell into place for me.

Gunstock Bottle Holder Layout
I planed down the wood to a consistent thickness, cut the angled bottom, smoothed out all the rough cuts my friend had made (while being true to the intended shape of the piece), then drilled the angled hole through the wood. Keeping the piece steady while the hole was bored out was a bit more of a challenge due to the fact that it didn't fit in my usual jig for making these bottle holders. Once all the cuts had been made, though, I sanded the piece down to a P-320 grit (very fine), used a charged cheesecloth to suck up the dust stuck in the open pores, and applied 5 or 6 coats of clear lacquer to bring out the grain structure and to protect the wood.

Closeup of Gunstock Bottle Holder, showing woodgrain
I listed the bottle holder for sale this afternoon in my Etsy shop, then updated my google base data feed to include it so it can be found in the search engines. Hope you like it!

Home from School and the Joys of Rocky Horror

Our oldest daughter came home from school for the weekend. At her school, there are a number of students who live far enough away that they can't go to their own homes for the Thanksgiving holiday, so we had one of them stay with us as well. She was very pleasant to have around and my lovely wife enjoyed having an extra daughter on hand, too.

Of course, my daughter knows she needs to be earning a bit of scratch while she's home from school (next semester's books ain't exactly buying themselves, y'know), so she'd signed up to work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday during her "time off." As I write this, we're getting a dusting of wet snow and she's on her third day in a row of work while on vacation. To her credit, she hasn't grumbled too much. She's lucky in that her summer job employer welcomed her back during her school breaks.

The working while on break's not too far off of what I've been doing with the woodworking during my own holiday time off. One of the first things I did was make up a new project for sale in my Etsy shop. It's a Holiday Star Wooden Tea Light Candle Holder:


It was ready just in time for the Thanksgiving Day feast we had here at the house (with 22 people in attendance). One of those in attendance was my sister, who celebrated (or probably tried to ignore) her 41st birthday earlier in the week. She saw a pair of the candle holders on the table and complimented me on them. I said "You like those? They're for you - happy birthday!" Then she proceeded to tell me what else she likes of mine... I guess it'd be safe to say they went over with her fairly well.

As I recall from being a college kid (and this is a stretch since I'm so very old, right?), one of the best parts about being on break is getting together with your friends from town again. My daughter had a few friends over to the house last night and after all the giggling at inside jokes, they sat down to watch Rocky Horror Picture Show - another step in the rite of passage that is getting through college. Since our home DVD player is busted at the moment, they gathered around the nearest widescreen laptop to watch.


Now, something I recall about watching Rocky Horror as a kid young adult was going to the theater (without a clue of what I was in for) and slowly figuring out for myself why people were squirting water pistols during outdoor rainy scenes, why rolls of toilet paper were being thrown at the screen ("Great Scott!"), and why everyone declared the actors were eating meat loaf for dinner; none of which my daughter or friends had even a clue about! One of the more enjoyable things I did as a college student at UConn was to present the film on campus as part of a fund raiser. When an ameteur acting troupe out of the New Haven, Connecticut area heard we were presenting the film, they asked if they could perform on the floor during the showings. I was naïve enough to say 'yes', but it turned out to be a highlight of the presentations.

Something else I recall about Rocky Horror was trying to relive the theater experience on a home theater VCR, only to discover that certain movies just do not translate well to the living room. Rocky Horror being first among them. The girls had their giggles while watching some of the racier stuff in the movie the other night, but they simply had no clue about the rest. They definitely missed out on the better 70% of the fun of going to "the show"!!

Coming up in my next installment: an interview with Etsy's MuffinTop Designs!
Stay tuned...

Etsy Members are the Best

I find myself this evening in the Holiday Inn Express in Toronto - or one of them anyway. There may be a half dozen of them in this city for all I know. It's the first time I've been to Toronto, but the purpose is the same as it's been for a while: I'm here to try and sell machinery for cutting, grinding, and polishing synthetic and natural diamond for industrial purposes - it's my day job, as it's been for three years now. Of course, with the US economy in the tank and taking every other nation's economy with it, Canada's automotive sector is having just as much trouble as America's. There are a few bright spots - companies that diversified into more than automotive, companies that deal with the Japanese automakers (who don't seem to be quite so hard hit (yet)), and companies that were never heavily invested in automotive to begin with. I'm hoping my travel schedule puts me in touch with more of them than the ones who are laying off most of their workforce, but I'll know better by the end of the week how that works out.


But more to the point of the title of this particular entry. I decided I'd check out who among the Etsians I've been in touch with in the various forums might live somewhere along the way between Connecticut and Toronto. [I got together on the way up with my best friend from high school, but that's a story for another day.] I've found that many of us in the Etsy forums have expressed an interest in meeting up with other members of the forums because we all seem to get along so well. I know that other web board members get together fairly frequently. I'm also a member of the b3ta.com boards and live in a constant state of jealousy of the friendships that have been forged first-hand through meetings at the numerous bashes held all over the UK. A number of b3tans have pledged that they'll have a bash in my honor, should I ever make it across the pond again, and I plan to hold them to it! They're a great bunch, and I'd love to meet them all!

As for Etsians on this particular trip, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting the proprietor of Muffintop Designs, who lives in the Toronto area, for coffee, before starting out to conduct the business of the day. This is the first time I've met up with somebody from the forums (I've met a customer or two as well as other sellers in the Connecticut area before), and it was a rare treat! Never has a morning coffee gone by so quickly! We both left with the feeling that we could've talked all day and not exhausted the subjects of conversation: selling on Etsy, selling at craft shows, our day jobs, our families, our pets, our spouses, what led us to do this crazy thing and how we've overcome inherent shyness to put ourselves out there and proudly spread out our wares to show the world that we enjoy creating! What a blast! She also has an entertaining and informative blog, so please support her as well and check it all out!

As for my own Etsy shop, I'm considering listing a bunch of "seconds" from the last batch of swords I made up. See, I had purchased a whole bunch of wood from a friend of mine from back when I used to live in North Carolina many moons ago. Oddly, some of it turned out to be wormy, which is sometimes okay if that's a characteristic you're looking for in, say, flooring for a converted farmhouse, but may not necessarily be desirable in a toy sword you'd want to get your kids for Christmas (unless your little pirate likes pretending he was a member of the worm-ridden undead crew aboard the Black Pearl). Am I wrong about this? I don't know - here's a photo of the swords in question:


Anyway, I was thinking of listing them at half price and seeing how they do. They'll still be sanded smooth, and woodburning a personalization is still free, so it's not a bad deal by any stretch. In the meantime, I think it's time to head to the lumber yard and find some poplar that's a little more solid for the next batch of swords. We'll see...