Cards printed with Andrew Crawford’s colorful original Celtic knotwork butterfly design now available in the shop.
Continue readingButterfly Knotwork Cards
Spirals Bookmark Redesign
I designed a kirigami Spirals Bookmark last summer, mostly just taking what I did for one of my velvet embossing plates and, using that with minor changes. It was good but, there were a few spots where it was a little fragile – bits of connecting paper less than a millimeter wide.
More recently, I was inspired to redesign the spirals bookmark to make it a bit more robust. While I was at it, I made a few and, made a few of my Celtic key pattern design bookmarks and, put them all up in the new shop section. The designs are available individually, in three-packs and, in a variety pack with all three designs.
Celtic Key Square Wood Inlay Pins
Celtic key pattern pins made from maple hardwood inlaid with walnut.
Continue readingDrawstring Key Bag
This scrap (faux) leather bag with a Celtic key theme is an initial exploration of a technique for using small scraps of leather or similar material leftover from other projects. I thought the tiles would be fun with a minimal Celtic key pattern motif in the center of each, then leaned into the theme with a circular key pattern ring on the bottom and, some 3D printed key, sculpted in Nomad Sculpt.
The SVG for the “leather locker” tile is linked below. You will likely want to adjust the slot height to match the thick ness of the material you are using. Let me know if you use it to make anything interesting!
This file is for personal, non-commercial use only. Note that, by referencing these, you are agreeing to release any variations you create under identical terms.
Depthmaps Straight from Nomad Sculpt
This is an update to my last post on modeling Celtic knots in Nomad Sculpt and creating depthmaps in Blender to carve with laser engravers and CNC machines. A newer feature in Nomad Sculpt makes it possible to export a depthmap directly, without having to go through Blender. A checkbox option in the debug menu (named “Heightmap”) switches to a depthmap view, which can be exported as a render. For best results, use a bitmap editor to spread the dynamic range.
I made a short video with a walkthrough:
Celtic Knots in 3D
I came up with a fairly simple workflow for creating 3D models of Celtic knots, used those to create depth maps and, used the depth maps to do 3D carvings on a laser (Glowforge) and a desktop CNC machine (Nomad 883).
Continue readingCeltic Spirals Bookmarks
This kirigami Celtic spirals bookmark is a variant of the pattern I used for embossing the purple velvet for the last dice bag. The gold and the smoke blue ribbon both look really good with the ice gold stock.
Slotted Dice Reliquary
Dice reliquaries from laser-cut hardwood ply.
Continue readingPurple Velvet Embossed Celtic Spirals Dice Bag
I made another dice bag with a new embossed velvet design. Some incremental improvements to the process for making the embossing plate: I switched to using 3M 468MP Adhesive Transfer Tape for the glue-up. It seems every bit as solid as the wood glue and, was a lot less hassle. More of the details are covered in the short update video below.
The kumihimo drawstring for this bag was done with glow floss for one of the colors and purple for the other. The glow from the floss is noticeable in the dark but, not especially bright.
By comparison, the 3D resin printed glow-in-the-dark skull beads are quite bright, especially after charging up with a UV lamp for 30 seconds or so. I used the Siraya Tech Craft resin for those.
[Amazon Associates links benefit a local arts organization.]
Hexagonal Box
This is a quick box I designed to package one of my little drawstring bags.
You can download the plain version below to make your own hexagonal box.
Hexagonal Box Pattern
This file is for personal, non-commercial use only. Note that, by referencing these, you are agreeing to release any variations you create under identical terms.
