MSRaynsford

I picked up a cheap tablet stand from Ikea today, being bamboo I knew it could be personalised and my wife loves anything Pusheen. I ran some tests on poplar to dial in some settings and test the style (the lines are wide and out of focus), obviously I should have been testing on bamboo. As soon as I started the first engrave pass I realised that the engraving turned the wood white and my colours would be out of whack. I quickly swapped the files and layers around to engrave the laptop and not the Pusheen.

I found some time today to make a full version of the new advent calendar. I assembled it with all the doors in order but they can be put in any order you want. I view this as a base for a real calendar, a little flourish across the top or a winter scene and it would make a nice product. You could also change the door knobs easily and size for extra customisation. This version is just large enough for quality street chocolates, obviously I have 22 days worth of chocolate to eat tonight :) ( svg here )

I made an advent calendar 5 years ago and despite requests to start selling them, I could never get them into a sensible time frame or budget. This year the discussion of advent calendars came up again and I decided to take another shot, this is how I would make a calendar now. The handles are made using wooden push pins (they need trimming), the doors are hinged by the wall sections and they rest upon the verticals to stop them being pushed in too far. There is enough friction in the hinge to keep them open during use. Obviously I've missed most of December now but I'll draw up the full 24 door version so I'll be well ahead for next year.

I have a couple of LED strips that I use as Christmas lights . This year I mounted one above the other and I needed some connectors to space them equally across the length. These little hangups were made from 5mm acrylic and allow the strips to slide in and out and clip into place (by squashing the silicon sleeve slightly)

I made a mistake while cutting the last set of Carcassonne tiles , I had a magnet too close to the tiles and it didn't cut cleanly. Unfortunately the files for Carcassonne have all the tiles split into two sets and all the tiles smushed together, there is no easy way to recut a single tile. This means it's time to redo the whole set and correct all the other things that have been niggling me. The original files were drawn in 2013 and over the last 4 years I've learned a lot more about inkscape so can do things better. The new file will use layers to allow me to easily turn parts on and off, and more colours which can be set up as operations in Lasercut. Several people have asked for tile sets without the grass, these tiles are generally used as guest books at weddings, no grass leaves more areas to write on. Roads and buildings never quite touched the edges of the tiles. It was close enough not to worry about but I knew it wasn't 'perfect'. L...

Craft time for the whole family, we're all at home so decided to make some wrapping papers. We started with simple brown paper and carved some potatoes to make printing stamps. For a second sheet we drew a single black line across a page and then finger painted a string of lights onto it, these should provide enough wrapping for a good handful of presents.

If we were making a Jurassic world cake  and we already make cake cars  we'd be a bit foolish not to make a Jurassic world Jeep. The jeep had a custom version of the car base to lift the vehicle a bit higher up but the mechanics are all essentially the same, meaning the car base can actually be quite versatile. Dawn covered the platform with cake and icing and did all the difficult decorating parts that actually make it look like a car, it's a very impressive job that I believe was completed at stupid o'clock the morning before the event. There's even video of the car driving through the gates (the car determined the size of the gates). I'd like to point out that I wasn't there though because friend don't let friends take vertical video.