Scroll Saw Village

Need a little help adapting patterns for scroll work? Sue Walters has written a great article for Scroll Saw Woodworking & Crafts covering just that. The article first appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of SSW&C. She explains the overall concepts of breaking down a line drawing or photo into sections. She explains negative and positive space in conjunction with bridges, which scrollers rely heavily on. These simple concepts will take you on your way to designing your own patterns in no time. Check out this quick article. You will look at patterns in a whole new way.

You can’t really mention intarsia without thinking of Judy Gale Roberts. She has been on the forefront of intarsia since the 70’s and has written numerous books and articles about the subject. Her website has a lot of great stuff, that it’s hard to pick just one to talk about in this article. So I’m gunna jump right in and highlight a few.

First, she has a couple of free intarsia patterns. We all like free stuff, right? She offers a whale pattern which is quite nice. But I really like her Santa Teddy bear. Christmas seems so far off, but this Teddy bear is such a great pattern, it’s hard to pass up. So definitely take a look.

Second, check out her newsletter/catalog Intarsia Times. She has several great articles in each issue, along with the patterns available she has available for sale. Intarsia Times is distributed in PDF format with a hefty download weighing in at 15.8 Megs! But don’t worry, you can request the catalog be sent to your home if you can’t handle the bandwidth. You can also find back issues of Intarsia Times here.

If you are looking to learn intarsia from the masters, check out their classes. 3 full days of intarsia goodness, complete with Jerry’s famous BBQ. You’ll walk away with a full belly and some mad intarsia skills. But sign up soon, because their classes are filling up quickly.

So, take a look around Judy’s website. There’s plenty of stuff to look at. Check out their patterns too. They do some amazing work! If nothing else, it’ll provide the inspiration for your next project.

We’re all kids at heart. There’s a certain part of us who still loves pushing around toy trucks. But a bigger thrill is building that toy truck and watching a delighted child push that truck around for us.

Shopsmith has a great article on how to build a bulldozer and truck set, designed by Norm Marshall. Much of the design can be cut with a scroll saw and a small assortment of hand tools. It can easily be finished off on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The article starts off with an interview with Norm about toy making and how he goes about it. Then it is followed with detailed instructions on how Norm built his bulldozer and truck. The article includes several illustrations and measured drawings to make assembly easier. Check it out! I’m sure there’s somebody you know who would love a hand crafted toy truck.

by: Shawn Vincent

For years, family, friends and even people who you just meet, have really liked the crafts you produce. They are the centerpiece for conversation at holiday dinners, or the, “that’s a great idea” thing when neighbors come over for a coffee. So, you’ve decided that you might be able to make a profit off of selling your crafts to others. Great! Here’s what you need to do to make it work!

1.) Have a plan – Even if you just scrawl it down on a piece of loose leaf paper, that will work – but you should definitely go into this with a plan. You will plan for things like: how many craft shows you will attend, the cost to make the craft and how much you should sell it for, craft show expenses (they vary from show to show), how many crafts you want to produce, and so on.

By going into this without a plan, you are essentially going in blindly, without a path to follow. This can be a precursor to failure – and that isn’t what we want. Set some goals, determine a few craft show costs and you are going to be much better off.

2.) Search the markets – A lot of people have expressed an interest in your craft, but are they going to buy it at craft shows? In order to find out, you need to go to a few craft shows before you start out on your own and decide if this product you have will sell. Are others selling it? If so, how is it selling?

Further, you can talk to craft store employees, other crafters, people at the craft shows – essentially anyone who might have an interest in your product and see if your craft is something they would buy. This is a slimmed-down version of market research – but it will be valuable to help you get your craft show business off the ground.

3.) Present well – If you have put together a plan, done your market research and you are ready to take this crafting business to the next level, then here is something you need to think about – presentation. If you just have a few tables with your crafts strewn about on the table – people will be less likely to buy.

However, if you create an attractive sales area, make your products easily accessible and provide a simple transaction for the customer – they are far more likely to buy!

4.) The price is right – You bet it is! You will have to do a little bit of price discovery when you start, just to see the price when most of your crafts are going to sell. Some tips for finding the best prices are: go a penny lower than the next highest number; for example $9.99 instead of $10. Ask people what they would be willing to pay for it. The question may come as a surprise to them, but chances are they will give you an honest answer.

The above points are just the tip of the iceberg. If you are starting a business to sell your crafts at craft shows, you need to do a little bit of groundwork before you start. Talk to others who are in the business and you will find out more along the way. Good luck!

About The Author
Shawn Vincent is the author of Craft Show Success Biz – http://craftshowsuccess.nitchmarketers.com. Here you will find loads of information on selling your crafts at shows, and online. You will also find lots of ideas on crafts to make as well.
vincent.shawn@gmail.com

The last few posts, I’ve been talking about scherenschnitte, the German art of paper cutting. But this is a scroll saw blog, right? So, why am I talking about paper cutting?

Its not hard to see that many of the design principles of scherenschnitte are shared with scroll sawn fretwork. The designs must remain continuous and unbroken. Each art form plays with positive and negative space that allude to details. Sometimes we cut out the shadows, and other times we cut out the highlights. The designs also share similar motifs. From strictly decorative, to word art, to scenic and wildlife designs. The styles between the two art forms tend to be a little different, but that’s what makes it interesting. Since the two art forms are so closely related, we can easily take stylistic and thematic elements of scherenschnitte and incorporate it into our own scroll sawn artwork to create a truly unique piece.

The problem with scherenschnitte is that it is very time consuming. Which also translates into expensive end product. Lets say you spent 2 hours on a paper cutting and you want to charge $30/hour. You’ll have to sell that paper cutting for $60. Probably out of the price range of many of your customers. You find scherenschnitte artists often make prints of their artwork and sell them instead. Which is fine, but I think I’d rather have a cutting rather than a photocopy. At the same time, I also don’t want to spend $60.

Scroll sawing has the same issue. However, we have a trick up our sleeves. We can stack cut our designs to create multiple copies. We can cut four layers (or more) of 1/8″ Baltic birch at the same time. So now, we have the same 2 hours of work and charging $30/hour. But now we have 4 finished pieces! Which means you can sell for $15 each and still get your $30/hour. That’s a pretty good deal. Now your customers are interested!

What if we combine the two art forms? What if we take 10 sheets of paper and sandwich it between 2 pieces of 1/8″ Baltic birch and stack cut them on the scroll saw? We end up with 10 paper versions of the design and 2 wooden versions of the design. I bet you can see where I’m going with this. But lets break it down anyway. 2 hours of work at $30 per hour is $60 worth of work invested. But, you end up with 12 cuttings all together! That means you can sell each cutting for $5 each and still make your $30/hour. Wow! But, that’s way too cheap! You don’t want to give away your artwork! So let’s boost the price of your paper cuttings to something more reasonable. In my neck of the woods, I can sell the paper cuttings for $10 each. And let’s sell the wooden versions for $25 each. Now you customers have the option of choosing a less expensive version of your artwork, or the wooden cutting traditionally associated with scroll work. Not only does this technique offer your customer choices, but it also increases the value of your work to $150 for 2 hours of work. I don’t know about you, but making $75/hour is not a bad gig!

So how do we go about cutting paper with a scroll saw? Well, Scroll Saw Woodworking & Crafts forum has a couple of great threads on just that. Read through these threads (Paper Cutting 1, Paper Cutting 2). You’ll learn a few techniques on how to add papercuts to your inventory.

by: Natalie Goyette

Think of an ideal craft show for a moment… thousands of people coming through the turnstiles at the fairgrounds or the exhibition areas with money in their hands and an intense desire to spend it. What about having a million people with access to your crafts at a craft show – at any time they wanted. That would really be IDEAL!

At a typical craft show, you are going to see hundreds, and maybe a couple thousand people visiting over any given weekend. Some shows are bigger than others, but even with 2,000 people coming through the gates, how many of them are stopping and looking at your booth with the intention of buying? It can vary. If you could somehow increase the number of people that stop by your booth, it makes sense that you could increase your sales, right?

Have you thought of a website for your crafts? This is the ultimate craft show – millions of people can access your information and your products, and you have limited set up fees – and orders can be placed while you are sleeping snug in your bed at night.

Putting together a good website for your crafts takes a little bit of effort to get off the ground, but it might be well worth the work. Here’s what you have to do:

” Design a site – You can probably find someone to give you a hand with this, and it doesn’t have to be very elaborate looking – just enough to show pictures of your crafts, their prices, a little bit about you… etc. It is important to make sure that you set the site up with a secure credit card payment system, as this will aid in a greater number of sales, just like in a regular craft show.

” Find a host – All sites need a web host in order to post them on the Internet. There are hundreds of providers out there, and you just need to find the one that is right for you. Chances are you have a friend or acquaintance that has a website, and they may be able to help you with on for your crafts.

” Drive traffic to the website – This can be done any number of ways: articles like this one, having others link to your site, update your pages regularly so your pages are indexed by search engines like Google and Yahoo! Coming up with the right keywords for your crafts is important for when people are searching the Internet for the type of craft you make.

” Maintain the site – I would suggest updating your crafting website at least once every two weeks, and maybe even once a week if you have time. This provides a certain amount of confidence for web buyers that your craft site up alive and well!

While having a website can certainly boost your sales, the other side of the coin is that you might be inundated with orders! That’s not necessarily a bad thing, except you could be working night and day to meet the orders! One way to avoid this is to post on your website how many of a certain item is available.

Remember imagining a craft show where millions of people came in and they had money to spend on crafts? Now you have it… albeit a virtual craft show. The sky is the limit when you are talking about selling your crafts on the Internet. With the right presentation, the right price and with the right traffic driven to your site, you can open the doors to your crafts for millions of people.

About The Author
Natalie Goyette is the author of the best selling e-book “Craft Show Success” which finally shows crafters how they can make money selling their crafts! www.craftshowsuccess.com.

From time to time, we want to add a little color to our projects. But not just a little color; a lot of color. The kind that stands out and says “Look At Me!” But as woodworkers, it breaks our heart to cover up the beautiful grain of the wood. What are we to do? Use leather dyes! Leather dye has incredible vibrancy that can’t be found in traditional wood stain. It is one of the favorite coloring techniques of Sue Chrestensen of Chrestensen Burghout Designs. She has written a great article on how she uses leather dyes to really punch up her designs. Check it out. While you are there, check out the patterns they have to offer. Their patterns are fantastic and many of the examples use this technique. Very cool.

by: Natalie Goyette

One of the things that you might consider is finding a niche for your craft. Maybe you have some expertise, skill, or interest that might be a creative tool for you to use in creating items for craft shows. Below are some hints to finding what that area might be for you:

What interests you? – You can take an interest you have and turn it into a craft show success. If you are a gardening hobbyist, why not come up with something every gardener needs. Provide that craft inexpensively and you might have yourself a winning craft for spring craft shows.

What do you have knowledge of – Maybe you are a model railway buff, along with being a crafter (the two go hand-in-hand) and you want to provide railway buildings or railway terrain for people to use in their own train sets. You have the knowledge of what needs to be built and used – so why not combined the two joys in order to come up with one profitable craft show item?

What are you good at? – If you are a good cook, then make a quick recipe book. If you are pretty good at organizing things, then why not come up with a desk organizer that anyone can use.

What are other people doing? – This is certainly not an open invite to start copying the design of other people at a craft show. Instead, it is an opportunity to see what is out there and for you to be the one that says, “You know, this craft would be better if it was… (fill in the blank).” Once you fill in that blank, it might trigger an idea inside your head of how you can improve this product or maybe even come up with one that works WITH it.

When in doubt, teach others – This is becoming a great way to make extra profits at craft shows. Some crafters love to take the bull by the horns and make their own crafts, so why not capitalize on that? Provide them patterns or instructions and unmade kits at a cost – so it takes the labor out of it but you are still selling the product.

At last resort, create a niche that works for a craft you have in mind. Sometimes that niche is staring right back at us and we don’t even know it. If we are good at something, or interested in another, or you see something you can improve on, feel free to take the initiative to take it and make a profit from it at your craft shows!

About The Author
Natalie Goyette shows you how to make your craft show business profitable in her best selling ebook: Craft Show Success Secrets. Visit her site: http://www.craftshowsuccess.com

Last post, I talked about Adrian Iredale’s video on how he makes wooden gear clocks. It is pretty inspiring and he makes it look a little less intimidating. But, maybe you’re not quite ready to jump into the deep end just yet.

Jim Bumgardner of KrazyDad.com has written about his experience making a wooden gear clock. He isn’t a woodworker. In fact he has very little woodworking experience. But he was curious about how clocks work, so he ordered the Ascent clock kit from Wooden-Gear-Clocks.com. Granted, the gears were all precut, but that shouldn’t matter too much. As scrollers, we know how to cut. Its the precise assembly that seems overwhelming. But Jim was able to put together the kit with little trouble. You can read about his experiences here. Its pretty interesting and he gives a little writeup about how the clock works. Check it out!

As pattern makers, we like to collect unique fonts to use in our designs. But often overlooked is the use of dingbats. Dingbats are fonts that have small pictures instead of letters. Sarajane of polyclay.com has a great article about how she uses dingbats in her crafts. She lists some of her favorite dingbats as well as some great dingbat resources. She also has a useful Font Table download where you can create printouts of all the characters in a particular dingbat. The article is very interesting and really gets your imagination going. She has a disclaimer, though. Collecting dingbats is addictive. So you’ve been forewarned!