Christmas Shoeboxes

Local skills help make someones Christmas.

The shed has come together in a great show of team work creating simple games from recycled wood.  We have been contributing to an Irvine initiative to send shoeboxes to Eastern European countries like Ukraine.

Blythswood Care has been running this initiative for a number of years collecting simple things like gloves and warm clothes to small toys and boiled sweats.  The campaign has now ended for this year.

Buckets of cold coffee and bleach for staining the disks.

We made simple draughts sets from drift wood collected from the sea shore near the shed.  Well weathered branches were dried and cleaned up, then sanded down to get a more cylindrical shape.  These were then cut in to disks and sets soaked in either coffee or bleach to get the different colours for the two players.

The new laser engraver has also been put to good use and we experimented with making wooden dominoes.  Again great team work with Craig producing excellent designs, Tam cutting out the pieces.  This has been a very informative exercise.  The etching was brilliant, cutting the thin plywood was easy, however finishing the pieces was slightly troublesome.  The ply wood tends to splinter and when sanding it was difficult to maintain consistency.  Resulting pieces were of slightly different size.

Results of the same wood soaked in bleach and coffee respectively.

Being low value items and made of wood, if anything, once they have hopefully given some entertainment they could be used as firelighters!