This past Christmas I couldn’t think of what to get for my girlfriend, so I started brainstorming and (surprise!) landed on another woodworking project. Through some not-so-subtle sleuthing, I found out all her favorite rivers (she’s a History major, we’re into that stuff) and used a dremel to carve them into a wooden Texas. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any progress pics, but here’s basically what I did:
- Begin planning, collect several maps of Texas waterways, sketch design
- Go to store, buy some Red Cedar. Make uncomfortable small-talk with cashier
- Transpose design onto wood (3 times over, since I knew I would make initial mistakes)
- Use Jigsaw to (VERY CAREFULLY) cut out Texas 3 times. These were cut in two pieces for simplicity and because the wood I bought wasn’t wide enough for my final design.
- Sand
- Use overlaid maps to pencil-sketch rivers onto Texas
- Use dremel to carve them out. If it’s your first time using one of these, I recommend about 15-20 minutes of practice on scrap wood of the same variety.
- Stain that sucker!
A few of the maps I used for the project:
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- Used these to create a vector image of just the rivers in Photoshop, which won’t upload on here for some reason.
things pat made 