Celtic Key Square Wood Inlay Pins
Playing with some small-scale wood inlay this week, I made these Celtic key pattern pins. The key pattern and larger key square are 30mm x ~3mm thick. The smaller key square is 25mm x ~3mm thick. These are all hardwood maple inlaid with walnut. Everything is cut on the laser, sanded to 650 grit and, finished with wipe-on poly. I attached pin backings with wood glue.
Acrylic Art Pen Caddy
I picked up a set of Uni Posca paint pens while working on a project. They came in several boxes and, I quickly realized they would be a lot more pleasant to use if I had a way to keep them organized. There are a bunch of appropriate caddy designs floating around that use planes with aligned holes. While those use less acrylic, they seem kind of fiddly to insert and remove pens. In the interest of keeping friction while working to a minimum, I designed this divided box caddy. This works well both upright and on horizontally.
I remember my grandmother working with acrylic in the 70s. I think she would have been amazed at how quick and easy this sort of thing is now with digital fabrication. Solvent bonding the pieces still requires some dexterity and practice to master but, doing precise layout in Inkscape and having the laser cut the pieces perfectly would have been magic back then.
Snow Elf Manor Pop Up Card
Inspired by the 2015 Snow Elf Cottage, the 2021 Snow Elf Manor is a larger home in the snow elf community. This was fun to design. The cards were cut from the Arctic Gold stock with translucent vellum for backing the windows.
I made a short (5 minute) video showing the whole process of building a card.
Drawstring 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.
Jack-O-Lantern
A quick jack-o-lantern modeled and (vertex) painted in Nomad Sculpt on the iPad, animated in Blender.
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: