MSRaynsford

While I'm slowly piecing together all the different projects I've been working on over the last few weeks for blog publication my Kickstarter  for fractal puzzles has been slowly ticking away in the background. It even reached it first stretch goal and I'm now offering the same puzzles with a Mahogany or Oak dye to add a bit of a colour. It's not too late to join in if you fancy it and if you act quick you'll notice that one of the early bird rewards has become available again due to dropouts. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/680177334/wooden-fractal-tray-puzzles 

A while back I found myself on one of Dinkydoodle Designs cake course where I made a moving BB9 cake , it taught me a lot about the cake making process and I used a lot of that knowledge in making this new Toothless Dragon cake. The electronic parts are simply a servo, arduino, neopixels and a sound recorder, all fairly common parts but I learned a lot making/baking my own cake. A 9 inch round cake was baked , cut and modified to form the basic shape required. Two crescent shapes were cut and moved up to form horns, the two eye sockets were added to the cheeks to pad them out a bit.  The cake was covered in chocolate ganache  to smooth out the lumps and bumps and firm the design up. Larger dollops of ganache further filled the gaps between the horns and the head. Chocolate Silk sugarpaste was used to cover the whole cake. A large rolled sheet was stretched into place, smoothed and trimmed down to the board. Details were added using rolled...

My kickstarter campaign has now been running a week and has a healthy number of backers, there is still time to grab one of the rewards though and get yourself a puzzle. If you like my blog then please do share the link on your own social media channels for me. I'm going to have a busy June making puzzles but it's definitely a good way to be busy. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/680177334/wooden-fractal-tray-puzzles/

I launched my kickstarter yesterday and this morning I awoke to discover it was 100% funded. This is great news so I shall now be making a bulk batch of Fractal Puzzles for people. There's still lots of time to get involved though, I'm even open to stretch goal suggestions if anyone has any ideas. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/680177334/wooden-fractal-tray-puzzles?

I have just launched a Kickstarter Project  for the fractal tray puzzles I made many moons ago. These tricky little puzzles are going to be made of BR Grade Birch Plywood and sanded to a fine finish before polishing with Danish oil so they'll look really good. I'm pleased to be offering them in this high quality finish and fingers crossed the campaign will be successful. For my regular readers with their own lasers who saw this many moons ago, I would ask that you please share the Kickstarter link somewhere so that I stand a chance of success. The more people that see it, the better. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/680177334/wooden-fractal-tray-puzzles

I don't mind admitting I was a little bit unsure about Maker Faire this year. I felt like it came around really quickly and I hadn't actually made that many new things since the previous year. I don't like showing the same stuff off again so I had to wrack my brains about something new to take. Clearly I was having a dumb moment and I ended up taking Dawn to the Faire  and a selection of the cakes we've been working on. I needn't have worried Dawns work is fairly unique in maker circles and throwing in some moving designs was enough to gain a blue ribbon. It was great meeting so many blog readers and old friends, thank you all for coming over to say hi. I shall endeavour to post more of the things I'm actually making as soon as I'm able to rather than leaving it all for months. Hi to all the new people just tuning in, hope you don't get too lost down the rabbit hole of previous posts (check out the gallery links at the top of the page). The...

The final piece I made for the Vipers LRP event last month was this monument. I've made a similar display case before so we were trying to improve upon that one. This time the monument could only be opened once all the corresponding rune keys were in place. As the keys were scattered around we thought it would be cool to make them glow when they were inserted into the monument. Some simple LED and microswitch arrangement, side lit the perspex runes. The runes were supposed to be easy to insert and hard to remove. The body was made with ply but painted with a stone effect. I don't believe it fared particularly well in the weather and could have done with a coat of sealant but I shall learn for next time. I even managed to pick up an action shot of this item too.