Nativity Scene - Joseph Part 3

Today I used my sanding sponges and polished the shaped pieces.  While doing so I found a couple of places I wasn't really happy with and so I sanded those a bit more.  But I spent quite a bit of time with the sanding sponges smoothing out all the sanding marks and giving each piece a nice smooth surface ready for staining.

I realized that in my pictures it might be a bit hard to see the relief detail so I took another picture from an angle so you can see the shaping I have done to give depth to the pieces and make it appear more 3D.

Nativity Scene - Joseph part 2

Here is Joseph after the rough shaping.  I have defined the edges and the depth that I want.  I used a 1/2 inch sanding band on my rotary tool to do most of this.  I have some small carving and etching bits that fit in my rotary tool.  I used one of those the get into the parts where the sanding band wouldn't fit.  This was mostly under the head of the robe where the robe is on top of the head.  I also used it to carve out the folds.

From this point I will use find sandpaper to smooth off all the pieces.  I will also use an air hose to get all the dust out of the folds.  You can't see them well here because they are full of dust.  I will also try and smooth out the inside of the top of the shepherd staff a little.  I didn't cut that part so well.

I don't have a nice sanding mop like the pros use to smooth this out.  So my cheap solution are sanding sponges that I get at Lowes.  The sanding sponges come in 60 grit, 220 grit, and 320 grit if I remember right.  I will mostly use the medium and fine sponges to get it ready for staining.  The sponges are nice because they are easy to hold and they will form to the piece a little like a sanding mop would do.  I also buy the ones that slanted edges rather than straight 90 degree edges because they can fit into small spaces nicely.

Nativity Scene - Joseph

I want to document my process for making these nativity scene pieces so I will start with showing the Joseph piece and include pictures along the way.  This one I am going to again just use poplar and stain the pieces the color I want them.

You start with a pattern like this.  Each piece is marked and a color suggestion.  M is medium color, D is dark color, L is light color and the face and hands are White.  I will leave the face and hands plain poplar, since that is the wood it calls for anyway. I still need to decide on the other colors but that can come later.  (The suggested wood is Sycamore for the light, Beech for the medium, Black Walnut for the dark, and Poplar for the face, hands, and feet.)  The pattern also has some shaping suggestions.  The shaded areas are those areas where you want to sand down more to create depth.  For example, the top of the head will get sanded down to make it appear to go up under the headdress.

After placing the pattern on the piece of poplar, I cut out all the pieces.  I separated them a little here so you can see the cuts. The hardest part is trying to determine what order to cut them in.  You want to try and cut the smaller pieces while they are still attached to larger pieces so you have something to hold on to.  I managed to cut all these out with my fingers in intact! This piece is about 3 inches tall.

Nativity Scene - Mary

Another post today!  Trying to get caught up.  After doing a couple of segmentation projects I was interested in true intarsia.  I have also wanted to do a nativity scene for a long time.  I searched around and found a pattern by Kathy Wise in the Holiday 2007 issue of Scroll Saw Woodworking & Crafts.  I ordered the magazine and read her article on how to complete the nativity scene.  I have also bought a couple of her books so I did some general reading about intarsia work.

After all was said and done, I chickened out buying some expensive hardwood and reduced this to another segmentation project.  I cut the pattern out of poplar and then stained the pieces the different colors rather than actually using different species of wood.  As you might guess, it seems to me that segmentation is much simpler to do.  Since you cut everything from the same board if you miss the lines a little it doesn't matter because the pieces still fit together.  If you were cutting them out of different wood, you would need to be much more careful about cutting right on the lines.

So this is how the Mary of the 12 piece pattern turned out.

I cut everything from poplar.  The face and hands I left as plain poplar.  I just sanded and shaped those and they got a coat of varnish at the end with everything else.  The lighter part of the robe I used Minwax Chestnut stain and the darker part is Minwax Red Mahogany.

Shaping this was a lot of fun but tricky in places.  Shaping between the knees was hard because I couldn't get anything in that place.  I ended up using a carving knife to shape it.  I am going to do a few more pieces and than maybe get up the guts to buy some hardwood and try this for real!

To finish I painted each separate piece with a couple of coats of varnish.  I used Minwax Fast-Drying Polyurethane.  Then I used gel CA glue to glue all the pieces together.

Giraffe Segmentation

I have been reading some of the post on the Scroll Saw Woodworking and Crafts site and I will concede that this is a segmentation project.  So here is how the giraffe went.

This actually went similar to the elephant.  I followed the same process for cutting and sanding.  It was a little more difficult because there are some small pieces.  I also used a wood carving gouge to cut the mouth.  As I suggested before I made the frame first.  After this I used Mod Podge to put the background paper on the backer board and then glued the finished frame to the backer board and clamped it down and let the glue dry for a day.  Then I fit the rest of the pieced into the frame.  I started with the right hand leaf first.  (As you can see I used some scrapbook paper on the leaves also.)  Then I added the pieces of the mane that fit in the leaf and then the giraffe head fit against the leaf and the bottom of the frame.  From there I just glued everything else in place.  I think it turned out pretty cute.  Gluing the frame together was still sort of a pain so now I want to invest in a picture frame clamp.  I found a couple of good ones on Amazon.