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.