Scroll Saw Village

Scroll Saw Village has added a live chat feature.  Talk in real time with fellow scrollers about the hobby we love.  The chat room is open 24/7 with a scheduled chat every Thursday at 7pm MST.  Once a month, we’ll pick a topic or invite a special guest to host a Q&A session.  For those of you who have taken the GIMP or Inkscape class, on Nov. 19th I’ll be hosting a live screencast in the chat room to answer any GIMP and Inkscape questions.  This is a great way to get your questions answered and demonstrated.    I hope you join us for our scroll saw chats.  We have a great time and look forward to seeing you there!

With Christmas right around the corner, its time to start thinking of making a few Christmas gifts for loved ones in your life.  To help motivate you to create a little Holiday sawdust, Scroll Saw Village is holding a contest! The winner will recieve a Rose Jewlery Box intarsia kit provided by Midlothian Woodworks, a $40 value.  Entry into this drawing is very easy.  Just post a picture at Scroll Saw Village of a cutting you intend to gift this Holiday season.  That’s it!  Want to increase your odds?  Post a Works In Progress tutorial in the forum as you put together your gift.  Include pictures and description and you’ll get another entry in this awesome drawing.  The winner will be drawn at random on December 1st, 2009.  You can find the entry details here.

While you’re at it, check out the other intarsia kits Midlothian Woodworks has to offer. Mike has a wide variety of kits to choose from and any one of them would make an awesome Christmas gift.  Be sure to thank him for sponsoring the contest too.  Without him, this fun little challenge would not be possible.

While we’re in our Holiday festivities mode, Scroll Saw Village is holding a Secret Santa.  Give and receive a cutting from a fellow scroller.  The deadline for registration is Black Friday (Nov. 27).  After which, you’ll get the name and address of of your recipient.  Put it in the mail and wait for your scroll sawn gift to arrive.  There’s a $10 cap on materials.  You might want to get started on your gift sooner than later to ensure it gets to the final destination on time.  You can register and find the details here.

As many of you know, I’ve been having trouble with my RSS feeds.  This means that those who subscribe to Scroll Saw Goodies via email have not been getting consistent updates.  I’ve fought with this for awhile with poor results.  I finally decided to move Scroll Saw Goodies to another server in hopes that this will fix things.  I guess only time will tell, but I’m hopeful.  So, as of August 8th, Scroll Saw Goodies will no longer be hosted with Scroll Saw Village. 

This move will be a good for a few reasons.  First and formost, I’ll be able to fix my main distribution of my blog posts (via email).  Plus, each website has very different goals.  Scroll Saw Goodies is focused on finding cool resources and publishing podcasts on scroll saw related topics.  Scroll Saw Village is a place where scroll saw enthusiasts can gather, exchange information, patterns, and make a few friends along the way.  So while Scroll Saw Goodies was instrumental in getting Scroll Saw Village on its feet, it is time for these two very different websites to be separated so they can flourish on their own.

I’d like to thank everybody who has stuck with SSG so far.  Be sure to update your bookmarks and any links to SSG.  You’ll be able to find us easily at www.scrollsawgoodies.com.  There will be much more goodies to come, so stay tuned.

I also encourage anybody who hasn’t become a member of Scroll Saw Village to register for your free account.  There’s lots of great information there, lots of friendly folks, plus access to hundreds of free scroll saw patterns.  We’d be glad to have ya.

Happy Scrolling!

This episode is all about sharing my latest projects.  If you can’t see the video below, please go to Scroll Saw Goodies and check it out there.

Wood Deals Online – I wanted to share a project that I’ve been working on over the last few weeks.  What started out as a tool to make my life easier, I quickly realized other folks would really enjoy this too.  But first, a little backstory.  I normally like to buy my  lumber online.  I find that I have a better selection and the prices are very reasonable.  One of my favorite places to shop for wood is eBay.  However, if you have ever shopped through eBay, it can be a bit overwhelming.  There is a lot of information thrown at you, you have to sift through so much garbage, and it can be cumbersome to find what you’re looking for.  So I created brand new website called WoodDealsOnline.com.   I gather all of the information from eBay and package it up in a nice friendly interface and organized it for easy shopping. We have woods broken into craft type (pen turning, wood turning, carving, scroll sawing, marquetry, etc.).  We also have the woods broken down by species, which intarsia artists will absolutely love!  So if you’re looking for birdseye maple or the all elusive ebony, it’s just a click away.  We even have the woods broken down by characteristics such as burl, spalting, tiger, etc.  This website is mostly geared to the woodcrafter/small woodworker, but furniture builders will find it very useful as well.

Be sure to check out the above video for a tour of the new website, then head over to Wood Deals Online and kick the tires a bit.  I confident you’ll like what you see.  Make sure you bookmark the website so that when you’re ready to buy wood for your next project, you’ll have it available.  You won’t regret it.

The Village Square – I’m happy to announce The Village Square, a monthly newsletter brought to you by Scroll Saw Village.  Subscribing to the newsletter is absolutely free.  Inside you’ll find informative articles, tips, pattern/project spotlights and more.  It will be conveniently delivered to your email inbox on the first Monday of each month.  Be sure to sign up now so you don’t miss out on a single issue!

The Village Store – When Scroll Saw Goodies was hosted on blogspot.com (before moving to Scroll Saw Village), I had a small Amazon associates store where I hand picked a number of products I believe my readers would enjoy.  It took some time, but I finally brought it back.  The store is now hosted on Scroll Saw Village.  You can easily find it in the top navigation bar.  Inside you’ll find a lot of great books organized by subject, a nice selection of clipart, professional graphics suites, and even scroll saws.  There are a lot of great stuff inside, so be sure to check it out.  If you don’t find what you’re looking for, click the Amazon banner to shop directly from Amazon.  It doesn’t cost you any extra, and any purchases made as a result of the store or banner helps support this podcast and website.  So next time you think of Amazon shopping, think of us and click our banner first.  You’re support is greatly appreciated.  We also have associate links to Rockler and Woodcraft.  So check those out too.

Inkscape Class – One last announcement that I didn’t cover in the video, we will be holding an Inkscape class starting at the beginning of September.  We’ll learn to use Inkscape to create our own scroll saw patterns.  It will operate much the same way as our GIMP class.  It will be held in the Village University forum and include video demonstrations, written instructions and class discussions.  It will be a 4 week class, with 2 lessons each week.  So mark your calender.

I’m happy to announce a new feature to the Scroll Saw Village network.  Introducing, Scroll Saw Wiki.  Scroll Saw Wiki is a new scroll saw reference anybody can edit!  You can find this new resource at www.scrollsawwiki.com.

Scroll Saw Wiki operates on the same powerful software Wikipedia operates.  Anybody can edit, add info, or create brand new articles with ease.  The idea is to have a robust reference created by the scroll saw community for the scroll saw community.  It could house all kinds of information including equipment, scroll saw manufacturers, cutting techniques, different types of scroll sawing, types of wood, books, magazines, websites, blogs, and the list goes on.  If it has anything to do with scrolling, add it!

Editing and creating articles is easy to do. If the link is blue, there is an article already written. Any written article can be edited by anybody just by clicking the Edit button. If the link is red, there hasn’t been an article written, so feel free to write the article. You can do a search for a term and if it comes up empty, you’re allowed to create that article! Its that easy! And don’t be concerned with writing a brilliant article. Just write it and if it needs to be edited, someone will come along eventually and fill in the holes, fix grammar or whatever! If you need help, there’s some help pages on the wiki. I’ve also created a Wiki Talk forum at Scroll Saw Village (in the Help & Feedback section).  There you can ask questions, request articles, discuss articles, and organize tasks.

Have fun with this new resource. Hopefully together, we can create an awesome scroll saw reference that will benefit all scrollers!

There has been a lot going on behind the scenes here at Scroll Saw Goodies and Scroll Saw Village.  I have lots of projects on my plate and my list keeps getting bigger.  I’m currently in the process of restructuring my RSS feeds.  iTunes is having trouble finding the episodes of the Scroll Saw Goodies podcast.  So I’m going to seperate the podcast from the regular feed.  Regular feed readers will still see the podcast, but subscribing in a podcatcher like iTunes will use a special feed.  This change shouldn’t affect those of you who already subscribe to the regular RSS feed via email or aggragator.  Unfortunately, those who subscribe in iTunes will have to re-subscribe.  You can find the new podcast feed here.  Please update your podcatcher, or subscribe to the podcast with the new feed address.  Sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused.  But I think this will work much better for everybody.

One note for iTunes subscribers.  Scroll Saw Goodies won’t be visible in the iTunes store for a few days, but the new feed address will work for manual subscribing.  I’ll post an auto-subscribe button in the sidebar when the iTunes store is updated.

With that said, I’ll be getting back into the podcasting saddle again.  Starting next week, I have a 7 part video series where I convert a photograph into a pet portrait pattern for the scroll saw.  This was a request of a forum member.  I found the pattern to be quite challenging and the series ran a bit longer than I’d hope.  But there has been several people who requested to see the entire process from beginning to end.  So that’s what I did.  Future episodes will be more concise.  So stay tuned.  I’ll start the series on Monday morning!  I hope you enjoy it!

I just wanted to remind everybody that the free drawing of the Pattern Designer’s Pack will be held in a short two days! So if you haven’t had a chance to sign up, please do so. I’ll be randomly drawing the winner on Feb. 14th at 11:59pm. You can read the rules for entry here. Good luck and Happy Scrolling!

Just a reminder to make sure you enter the Scroll Saw Village drawing.  We’ll be holding a random drawing on Feb. 14th, 2009 for a Pattern Designer’s Pack that includes 3 clip art books from Dover publishing (Big Book of Silhouettes, Ready-to-Use Sports Silhouettes, 1500 Decorative Ornaments). Entry is easy. All you have to do is post a reply in the contest thread that you wish to be entered. You can get additional entries by uploading pictures to you User Gallery or patterns (the ones you have designed) to the Pattern Library. You can find the contest thread here with the full rules for entry!

Well, Scroll Saw Village is only 5 days old now and it looks like we’re off to a pretty good start!  As of this writing, we have 75 new members, 41 topics, 209 posts, 57 photos uploaded to the User Gallery, and 15 patterns in the Pattern Library!  I think we just might make this work!  I want to thank all of you who signed up and started participating!  For those who have not checked out the new website, head over to http://www.scrollsawvillage.com.  We have forums, User Gallery, a Pattern Library, and of course Scroll Saw Goodies.  Be sure to enter the contest too!  We’re giving away a Pattern Designer’s Pack.  This includes 3 clip art books from Dover Publishing that you can use in your own designs.  It’s a really great collection.  You can find out more information here.

Even though we’re off to a good start, we’re not out of the woods yet.  I still need your help to get Scroll Saw Village on its feet.  The easiest way for you to help is to register for your free account.  Its that easy!  Then with your shiny new account, start a discussion or two and encourage others to respond.  Open discussion is the life-blood of a forum.  So the more people we have talking, the better our survival rate! 

Upload some pictures to your User Gallery.  We’d love to see some of your work.  While you’re there, be sure to comment on others’ pictures.  There’s already a lot of neat stuff posted that you’ll find interesting.  So leave a comment or two on the ones that catch your eye.

If you’re a pattern designer, post a pattern or two ( or twenty) to the Pattern Library.  Everybody really appreciates free patterns and very thankful for all the hard work and care you put into your designs.

Tell others about Scroll Saw Village.  The more people involved in this community, the better!  More people means more discussion, more content, more patterns, and more friendships.

Many of you have websites.  I’d love it if you’d post a link to Scroll Saw Village.  Or better yet, if you’re a blogger, write a post encouraging others to check us out!  (note:  I’ll be implementing a link section in the next few weeks, so I’ll be able to return the link-exchange favor).

Anyway, I hope you enjoy Scroll Saw Village.  I continue to add little tweeks here and there.  I’ll be reorganizing Scroll Saw Goodies over the next few days.  Hopefully making it easier to find the information you need!  I’m certainly not done yet.  I have a bunch of other cool features in the works and I look forward to sharing that with you in the near future!

Thank everybody for a successful first week.  Lets keep the momentum going!

–Travis

Welcome to the new Scroll Saw Goodies.  I’ve been teasing the new design for the last several weeks, and now its upon us.  The new redesign is in fact a completely new website!  Scroll Saw Village is a new online community for scroll saw enthusiasts.  Chat, share tips, exchange patterns, and just casually talk about our favorite activities.  I think it will be a really great addition to the scroll saw community.   But don’t worry, I haven’t given up on Scroll Saw Goodies.  I’ll continue to regularly blog and share the goodies I have come across in my internet travels.  In 2009, I’d like to focus a little more on the podcast, introduce some screen casts, and offer more tutorials.  It should be a fun ride!

I hope you enjoy the new website.  I worked hard to make this a comfortable and easy-to-use.  If you need help, feel free to contact me via email, or leave a post in the forums.  Here’s to a prosperous New Year!

Happy Scrolling!

–Travis