For a while, I made Ceramic Tak Stones for the Worldbuilders charity.
After I had made over 10,000 pieces, I realized that I wasn’t cut out for that kind of production work. The most interesting part (beside meeting Pat Rothfuss) was developing the right tool to slice the extruded clay into individual stones. There were several iterations of the slicer, finally ending up with guitar hardware and brass half-rounds to keep the cutting wire tight enough to do the job.
Tolkien’s The Red Book of Westmarch was a project I did for myself. I created my own leather-bound copy of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. While still in English, the book is written phonetically with the Elvish characters.
I’m afraid that copies aren’t available. I have queried the Tolkien Estate and they have no interest in licensing the text for this project.
I relettered all the maps and figures with Elvish characters and wrote an extensive software library to perform the text manipulation and conversions. The pages were printed on a sheet-fed laser printer, then grouped into false signatures before being hand-stitched and bound. Here are some of the stages of binding the book once the sheets were printed.
Police Box/TARDIS Planter formed in a plaster slip-cast mold. I made the mold from scratch, starting with an original wooden sculpture of one side of a police box.
This image shows the progression from original wooden sculpt to silicone mold to resin casting to plaster mold to slip casting:
Merida’s Bow (from Disney/Pixar’s “Brave”) made for a cosplayer. The wood is oak, shaped with spokeshaves and drawknife, then steam-bent and pressed into a custom-built form. The bow is non-functional, but has two strings – one heavy, solid string for wearing the bow across the shoulder, and one elastic string for posing with the bow “drawn”.
This image shows the steam-bending form and the heat transfer of the celtic knot pattern:
The Intrepid Girlbot by Diana Nock. The model of the title character was made as a gift.
This image shows several of the successive masters I made to create the final mold. The final piece is urethane resin, brass, and a commercially-made raccoon.
A Little Clank from Girl Genius (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com) This was made as a gift for the creators of the Hugo Award-winning comic Girl Genius by Phil & Kaja Foglio. This piece was machined out of brass stock. Even the screws.
These images show some of the internal structure.
This is 1:72 scale architectural mockup I built over one weekend to help churchgoers visualize the child care center they were being asked to help build. Unfortunately there are no good pictures. The mockup was discarded after the building was constructed.
This is a yarn bowl I threw on a wheel in school.
Madame’s Civilising Influence is a steampunk-themed prop pistol made for a friend who is Lakota Sioux. The medicine wheel was a requested part of the design.
These images show some of the design and construction steps.
Buttergerbil Stained Glass Window Hanging from Shaenon K. Garrity’s Narbonic. The Buttergerbils (or Gerbilflies) appeared at the very end of the comic when [spoiler] and [spoiler] were living on the [spoiler]. There is a printable pattern for this under the Downloads menu above.
