Stained Glass: Framed Black Lotus

Update: The piece sold during an 8-hour long silent auction, raising $5,678.90 for Child's Play! Congratulations to the new owner! I'm already excited to see what we can make for next year's Desert Bus.

We got the idea to make something for Desert Bus for Hope last winter, and this summer we finally set aside a weekend or two to actually do it (after hearing back from the Craft-along folks). The design we settled on was the iconic Black Lotus of Magic fame, with a circular frame of dichroic frosted glass, what for the thematic multi-color reflections.

If it wasn't clear from the first bit - This very piece CAN BE YOURS! Just tune into this year's Desert Bus for Hope, starting November 9th. We don't know yet if this will be a give-away or an auction, but by the time Desert Bus ends some charitable soul will be the lucky new owner of this, the rarest (and possibly heaviest?) of black lotuses.

It's true I've done a glass lotus before, back in 2013, but this was a much more intricate undertaking, involving more individual pieces and fused-paint details. Both my partner and I are a good bit more experienced than we were five years ago, and wanted to make sure the result would be worth sharing. I should clarify, she did the vast majority of the work on this piece, I helped with cutting and grinding, but she deserves the real credit for the result!

I wish I'd taken more process photos, but aside from being picky about orienting the dichroic segments, there weren't too many tricky bits to document.

Black lotus stained glass
Black lotus stained glass
Lotus in reflection
Lotus in reflection
Wrapping up to get shipped to Canada
Wrapping up to get shipped to Canada
Packed up safe!
Packed up safe!

Big update: More boxes, more shirts, and beer!

It's been a good while since I've set aside time to scratch out an update, but not for lack of activity. Rather than split all the projects across several posts, I'm opting for one big one! On the woodworking side, I pulled two boxes together: one to house the awkwardly large Planechase planes, and a tea-box as a mother's day gift.
 
While planning out the Planechase box, I stuck to the philosophy that each new project needs to have at least one element I haven't wrestled with before. This time: hinges, felt lining, and one-piece box construction! For materials I went with a plank of bubinga that I picked up a few weeks ago, with curly maple and blue paua shell for the inlays. The lid and bottom were attached with rabbets and the corners 45-degree mitered. A small riser was added to the dice-holding compartment to make it easier to get at them.

 

Just after sawing the lid off
Just after sawing the lid off
Chaos symbol in curly maple inlay
Chaos symbol in curly maple inlay
The planeswalker symbol in curly maple inlay
The planeswalker symbol in curly maple inlay
Loaded with all the sleeved planes and dice!
Loaded with all the sleeved planes and dice!
Planechase anthology symbol inlaid in blue paua shell
Planechase anthology symbol inlaid in blue paua shell
It was my sister's idea to whip up something together for mother's day, and we hit upon the idea of a tea box. She provided the graphics for the lid, helped select materials, and provided plenty of encouragement. Ribbon sapele and bird's-eye maple were picked for the box and top/bottom respectively. For the joinery I decided to make it as fancy as possible, and ended up building a dead-simple box-joint jig for the table saw. After a few tests, I was able to make nice tight-fitting box joints in the fancy wood! The patterns were laser'd on, and a small inlay of niove was glued in. 
 

 

The finger joint jig ready to go
The finger joint jig ready to go
Practice joints looking almost right
Practice joints looking almost right
First attempt at a magnetic closure
First attempt at a magnetic closure
Ribbon sapele showing off the finger joints
Ribbon sapele showing off the finger joints
Lid with noive inlay
Lid with noive inlay
While digging through my closet I came across an early attempt at a megaman shirt and decided that it'd make a good target for a re-do. I hunted down a suitable graphic and went through what, at this point, is a tried and true process. I'm much happier with the result!
Megaman shirt
Megaman shirt
 
Lastly, I got bit by the home-brew bug a week or two ago! I dug out and inventoried my equipment, and picked up an ingredient kit at the local brew shop. When thinking about the trajectory, I realized I don't really have a group of thirsty grad-student friends to conscript for bottling day any more, so I took the next logical step: a kegging setup! 
 
Fridge keg!
Fridge keg!

 

With that set up, current dispensing sparkling water, we got started on the brewing. A scotch ale was the order of the month. The brewing was briefly put on hold while the fittings on our new kettle got a few wraps of plumbers tape, but after that there were no issues during the boiling, cooling, or moving it to the sanitized carboy. A couple days after pitching the yeast, some drama struck! 
Post-geyser solution
Post-geyser solution
 
The fermentation was a bit over-zealous! We quickly ran out for some 1/2" tubing, and fitted it as a blow-off tube, the far end submerged in dilute sanitizer. By the next evening it was done pushing out krausen, and has settled into a slow and study bubbling. In retrospect, a fairly surgery brew in a smaller-sized carboy; I should've expected this and fitted the tube right off the bat, but learning is fine too.  Bottling went smoothly, with half going into about 20 bottles, the rest going into the keg.
20 bottles of tasty scotch ale
20 bottles of tasty scotch ale!

Ulamog, the Creaseless Shirt!

I took a break from other projects for an evening to whip up another shirt pattern. The Eldrazi titans were a tempting target, but I ran into the problem that almost none of the art shows what their leg-tentacle-appendages. Also, across artists, the details on each titan tend to change a little each time. Octopus-like walking-tentacles are what I settled on.

Ironed Ulamog pattern
Ironed Ulamog pattern
Ulamog, the Creaseless Shirt
Ulamog, the Creaseless Shirt

Woodworking: Inlaid Box for Cube

This is a project I've had in the back of my head for more than a year now. Every few months it'd resurface and I'd jot down some dimensions, look into materials, and inevitably get distracted by life. A week ago I had totally open weekend and decided that it was time. Unfortunately I didn't pause to take progress shots, but the vast majority of the techniques are the same as I used in the deckbox and land station. The corners are miter joints, the "floor" and lid are set into 1/8" deep rabbets all the way around, and the dividers simply slot into 1/8" deep dados on both sides.

Materials-wise, I stuck with maple for the frame, with bird's eye figure this time, ceder for the dividers, and baltic birch plywood for the lid and floor. The ceder was a lot softer than I anticipated, but I don't expect much wear on the dividers, and the smell is amazing. The inlay materials are cherry veneer, three colors of paua shell veneer, and five semi-precious stones (being pearl, blue onyx, onyx, carnelian, and malachite).

After sanding to 600 grit the maple and cherry got a coat of danish oil, producing a lovely warm and deep look, but I found in testing that the plywood looked miserable and blotchy with that approach. I ended up going with a few layers of spray varnish and a final sanding with 600 grit and ultra fine steel wool on the plywood, giving it a satin feel and slightly warming up the color without any of the blotching.

Laser cutting the lotus pieces (sorry for the vertical video, I know)

The veneers and lid-inset were all laser cut, requiring six different cutting patterns to get everything matched up and at the right burn-depth. Needless to say, some experimentation went into this process. An additional mini-project came out of this testing as well, which I'll post later on!

Dry fitting inlay
Dry fitting inlay
Dry fitting the shell veneer
Dry fitting the shell veneer

The veneers were attached with a thin later of Titebond I (I know there are better glues, even just TB III, but I didn't want to put off this project for another week) and clamped with wax paper for an hour. The same spray vanish and rub-out procedure was used on both sides of the lid, giving it a wonderful feel. Finally the stones were secured with a drop of cyanoacrylate super glue each.

Beautiful maple figure on the front
Beautiful maple figure on the front
Nice even rows, glue just dried!
Nice even rows, glue just dried!
A head-on shot of the final result
A head-on shot of the final result

While this project was only a marginal step up in complexity, I still learned a ton while working through it. While every small mistake and blemish that ended up in the final piece stand out a lot to me, I'm still really happy with the result!

Both cubes snugly in their new home
Both cubes snugly in their new home!

Even more shirts - Sheoldred and Etched Monstrosity

Note - I'm working on getting all the stencils I've generated into a consistent format, as I do intend on posting them here! It could take a bit, but I wanted to get these shirts and the process post up this weekend. Also, I definitely don't own the original images, they're posted here only for illustration / education purposes.

These might be the last shirts for a while, been on a bit of a tear with them lately. The shirts used for these two (depicting Etched Oracle and Sheoldred, Whispering One) were Hanes Premium X-Temp V-necks, which yielded a more orange color when bleached. To not bury the lede too much, here are the final results!

Sheoldred completed shirt
Sheoldred completed shirt
Etched Monstrosity completed shirt
Etched Monstrosity completed shirt

At this point I've settled into a workflow for generating designs from art, which breaks down into five steps -

Original art - Etched Monstrosity
Original art - Etched Monstrosity

First, isolate the subject. In GIMP I end up using the lasso-select tool and color-select tool as necessary to delete the background. This can take a while if the edges are hard to see, or if the subject blends slowly into the background, like Sheoldred does.

Isolated figure
Isolated figure

Second, create two new layers. The first is a block of black that fills the entire subject, providing a silhouette for later, but is kept "off" for the intermediate steps. Second, a "highlights" layer that sits at the very top of the stack for providing the "gaps" between pieces. These gaps create depth in the final design by allowing objects to pass behind each other, so it's important to grok how the original image is arranged.

Third, as the art on most cards is cropped by the frame, as need to expand the canvas enough to complete the figure. This usually means adding feet, tendrils, arms, etc. so the finished shirt doesn't have an artificial "frame" imposed on it.

Blocking layer with extensions
Blocking layer with extensions

Fourth, and most time-consuming, adding the gaps. On the highlight layer I've settled on using 3-5px wide pencil and pen-curve tools to trace out the boundaries of each piece. Inevitably there's some iteration as I apply these at high zoom, and have to zoom out to make sure it all still parses at a distance.

Completed with highlights
Completed with highlights

Lastly, moving the file (usually in png format) over to Adobe Illustrator, to convert it all into paths. I fell into using the "black and white logo" setting on live trace as it has produced good results so far, but your mileage may vary. The only thing left to do at this point is to expend the resulting object into paths, un-group them, and delete the unnecessary segments. For me, this usually means retained islands of white. If kept, during cutting the laser will attempt to cut the boundary multiple times, isn't ideal.

For the cutter I'm using it expects vector cuts to be 0.01 pt black stroked paths, so I set everything to that and no fill color. I've also found that the speed-power-frequency settings needed to produce good results is about 80/5/2500, on a 150W cutter. After cutting the pieces of freezer paper are taken back home, and the host-shirt is laid out on an ironing board. After centering things up, I can start placing pieces and "gluing" them down with brief contact from a hot iron. Be sure to check you don't iron the wrong side of the paper, it WILL glue itself to your iron. Both of the patterns in this post took about 45-60 minutes to position all the fiddly pieces, tweezers were definitely a must. I've dropped an in-progress shot below.

Placing so many pieces
Placing so many pieces

After it's all ironed down, a plastic poster-holder is slotted into the shirt to prevent bleed-through and bleaching of the back surface, and it's set outside either on the concrete or a protected work surface. I've settled on 4-6 fine sprays, quickly dabbing the excess off of the papered regions with a paper towel, followed by a five minute wait. I did that twice for each of these, followed by a minute or two agitating it a bucket of ice water to halt the bleaching. The water definitely turned orange. Lastly they were both thrown into the washer for a short cycle and dried. That's the whole thing!

Even more shirts

This is a short post, but I did want to show off the Phyrexian Obliterator shirt I made, as I managed to get it signed by Todd Lockwood (the original artist) at Emerald City Comic Con this year! There are two big differences between this and the previous designs I'd done. First was the sheer number of independent pieces of wax paper that had to be positioned relative to one another, thankfully I was able to position and then "fix" a few pieces at a time, and they were generally well behaved. Second was the amount of pre-processing that went in. Rather than starting with someone else's stencil, I started directly with the card art, first isolating the beastie from the background, and then adding breaks to highlight each plane of depth within the image, and eventually pushing it all to illustrator to generate paths. The laser cutter also had a bit  more power than intended, so a few pieces that came out charred had to be re-made by hand with a hobby knife. That all said, I'm really happy with how this came out! Now that it's signed, I'm not sure I'm going to be wearing to on the regular, but might try to frame it somehow.

Ironed and braced for the bleach!
Ironed and braced for the bleach!
Final shirt, signed!
Final shirt, signed!

Woodworking: Curly Maple Deckbox

My second real project in wood, a commander-sized deckbox, represented a step up in joint complexity and wood quality. I also had to deal with an unexpected issue, namely wood movement. The board of curly maple was purchased months ahead of time, with a couple different ideas in mind, and during that interval it went from a beautifully flat and square board, to a pringles-chip shaped board with slightly off-true edges. Had I been more motivated, I suppose I could have use a hand plane and pared it down to flat. With time at a premium, and a deep conviction that clamping and gluing can do amazing things, I did my best to roll with it.

I also tried to remember to take process photos as I went, not only to share here, but also for my own benefit the next time I kick off a project. The basic design was pretty simple: rabbet joints, rabbet joints everywhere. The four vertical walls of the box all get an eighth-inch deep 3/4 inch tall rabbet along their bottom edge to accommodate a beefy cheery base, and additional rabbets along the vertical edge for the left and right sides. One concern from the outset was the stability of cutting an eighth inch of material away from panels only a quarter inch thick, but going slowly, it did work out. Additionally, an eighth inch deep, quarter inch tall, slot was cut into the back and side panels to allow for a side-in lid. It's worth noting here that the lid had to be subtly tapered by sanding the edges meant to mate with the slots to allow for easy movement.

Raw materials
Raw materials

The raw materials were a 24" x 5" x 0.25" board of curly maple, and a 3/4" thick board of cherry (which I'd previously been using as a backstop to prevent tear-out when sawing). Both boards were wider than my miter box would allow, so I ended up using clamps and the straight edge of other boards to establish the cuts. In the photo below, the saw is neatly guided by straight-edged stock on both sides.

Sawing setup
Sawing setup
All the pieces
All the pieces

With all the pieces cut, the front panel (notably 0.25" shorter than the others, to permit the lid to slide out) was off to the laser cutter. I should also note, the design is not mine, it was found here, and was simply too cool to pass up. Maple takes laser engraving very well, and even grey-scale depth features were rendered very well.

Laser-cut design
Laser-cut design

Unfortunately I forgot to take any photos during the routing step, but they were all executed with a 0.25" flat router bit at medium-low speed. For the finish, I wanted the grain to really pop, so I used the remainder of the board as a test piece (seen far left in the photo below). The top portion of the test piece got two coats of diluted anoline dye, then two coats of Danish oil, while the bottom simply got the oil. I settled on dye+oil again, but in retrospect should probably have gone darker (less dilute) on the dye. The blue-taped areas, aside from the test piece, were to exclude oiling the gluing surfaces.

Finishing
Finishing

After a brief dry-fit, gluing and clamping went on for two days. I did have to make a second pass, as a small gap opened up in one of the corners, but after that it looked good.

Gluing and clamping
Gluing and clamping

Finally, here are some photos of the final product!

FullSizeRender (2) IMG_1693

I probably won't rely so heavily on rabbet joints in the future, but this was super instructive in the difficulties and details of executing them. Also, this came together more quickly than the first project! As I get my basic skills in line, things go a bit faster and smoother, but there's still seemingly infinite room still to grow.

Woodworking: MTG Land Station

I've been playing around with the idea of woodworking for pretty much the whole year now, watching videos on YouTube and tearing through a few books on the topic. I did a few simple projects leaning heavily on the laser cutter to do all the operations, but that isn't really woodworking. I finally decided to put together a land station, that is, a box for people to grab basic lands on those rare times a draft comes together!

The design is fairly simple, four planks of wood for the sides of the box, with 45 degree mitred edges, and four dados (slots) for dividers, plus a flat plank as a bottom. The dimenions of a card are (roughly) 3.5 inches tall, but 2.5 inches wide, and I ran with those for my first attempt. Trying to put a 45 degree miter along a 3.5 inch edge with a hand saw was a losing battle, and the prospect of putting in eight dados with a router plane (something like this) sounded frustrating. After quite a bit of hemming and hawing, I eventually bit the bullet and bought a router, some bits, and a table for it. While there was a sale going on at the time, I certainly had to convince myself that I'm excited for more than this one project.

The dimensions were driven in part by the cheap wood I had access to, namely long planks of quarter-inch thick, 3.5 inch wide pine. I kept the height and stuck with a single thickness to simplify the sawing operations, which are harder than they look. I ended up using a cheap clamping mitre box to establish a perpendicular cut line, and then clamped the piece to a heavy piece of scrap for the remainder of the cut to prevent tear-out (an issue that frustrated me enormously at first.)

My initial design had tolerances that ended up being too tight, and it was going to be impossible to get the cards in and out. The final dimensions of each piece are laid out below. The critical number turned out to be 2.75 inches -  the width of the empty space (measured from divider edge to divider edge, not centers) for each card "lane". If that sounds a little too big, it's because it is, but a small error one way or the other won't prevent cards from getting into or out of the box. In the future I'll probably shave 1/8th inch off that value to reduce card "jiggle" in something like a deck box.

  • 2x sides (L/R) -  3.5" x 5.5" x 0.25"
  • 2x sides (F/B) - 3.5" x 15.25" x 0.25"
  • 1x bottom - 5.5" x 15.25" x 0.25"
  • 4x dividers - 3.5" x 5.25" x 0.25"

The dados to retain the dividers are 1/8th (0.125) inch deep on the front and the back, and were cut with the fence fixed to ensure they ended up aligned. I had to make up a 90 degree jig by clamping some heavy blocks to cut the furthest-in dados, as the fence can only move about 5 inches back from the bit, but it worked well enough. The mitres were put on with a 45 degree router bit, over many passes to carefully creep up on the proper depth. Once all the cuts were done, the front panel was off to the laser.
 


 

The pattern was generated using the vector mana symbols generously posted by Goblin Hero over at Slightly Magic, they had just to be scaled and moved around to fit the panel. I put down some masking tape to prevent resin deposition on the wood, but it also seems to have caused some line-artifacts in the final cut, likely due to "thick" overlaps attenuating the beam. In the future I'll probably avoid using tape and just sand the surface clean afterward, as the residual adhesive also looked to interfere with the dye and oil in a few places. For reference, it was cut on an Epilog Ext36 150W in raster mode at 600 DPI, 100% speed, 70% power, in a single pass.

Cut pieces laid out for dry-fitting
Cut pieces laid out for dry-fitting

After sanding all the sides with a ~250 git sanding sponge, the sides and panels were glued together using titebond and a 90 degree clamp, something I didn't even know existed before needing one. I was able to snugly fit in the divider into the back without glue, and press the front panel on for gluing.

Gluing the front panel
Gluing the front panel (bottom is not attached)

After letting it dry over night, I was ready to dye and finish it. I'd experimented with some scrap wood from the same boards to see how the dye and oil finishes would look, and settled on Transtint golden brown diluted in water, and a Danish Oil finish. I applied the dye carefully, given all the warnings it comes with, and gave it plenty of time to dry. Then the oil finish went on and took all night to set, I opted for a single layer as I wasn't looking for a shiny or silky appearance, just sealed. At this point I finally glued on the bottom and gave it a few hours to set.

Nest of clamps
Nest of clamps
Finished land station
Finished land station

It definitely took a lot more time, effort, and learning to finish this than I anticipated, but I am happy with how it came out. I've already gotten a lot of good suggestions for improving it (e.g. cutting semi-circular access holes at the front of each row so you can always get at the cards, also adding a lid isn't a bad idea), but will probably move on to other projects for the time being. The next on my list is a commander deck box, and after that, a substantially more intricate box for my cube to live in. I've got to spread out that tooling cost somehow!

Dimir EDH Box with Nacre Inlay

It's been a while since I've put up an update, but I haven't been up to nothing. I found out that I have access to a beefy laser cutter through my work, and have been throwing various projects at it over the last few weeks. One of the first things I wanted to try was precision inlay and making a rudimentary deck box. My first target was my Lazaav EDH deck, and it provided a good opportunity to get my feet wet with both laser cutting, inlay, and wood staining. The material itself comes from an 1/4" thick oak project board. I had pondered putting on a few layers of shellac or other finish to smooth it out, but decided that I'd already learned what I'd wanted to, and kinda preferred the woodgrain look.

Showing off the inlay colors
Showing off the inlay colors
The lid fits, but not perfectly
The lid fits, but not perfectly
The ebony stain looks almost exactly like I wanted it to
The ebony stain looks almost exactly like I wanted it to
I didn't both to finish the interior on this one, a final version would definitely have a lining.
I didn't both to finish the interior on this one, a final version would definitely have a lining.

The pattern for the box itself was generated using MakerCase, but I think for later projects I'm going to opt for actually making the joints myself to ensure they fit. There seemed to be some inconsistencies with the laser kerf (similar to the saw-depth for conventional cuts) that prevented perfect mating, and I haven't dialed in the compensation for that.

Over all this served as a proof-of-method and tools for doing nacre inlay on later projects, and bonus points: it still works as a box.

Recognizing Cards - Finding the Match

In the previous two posts in this series (1, 2) I talked about capturing a reliable image of the art on a magic card from a webcam, and how we can hash those images for an effective and mostly efficient comparison. Now we're left with a hash for the card we'd like to match, and an enormous table of hashes for all the possible matches (something like 18,000 cards). The first question is how to compare the hashes in a meaningful way, but thankfully this is made easy by the nature and documentation for phash. The Hamming distance, or number of dissimilar characters in the string, is the metric of choice. This method is demonstrated step-wise below, first for the correct target, then for a random non-target image.

When compared to the actual match, the Hamming distance is 9. Mismatched character are highlighted in red.
When compared to the actual match, the Hamming distance is 9. Mismatched characters are highlighted in red. While the cutoff value might take some fine tuning, for our purposes (and my camera), 9 is a relatively strong match.
Hashing_example_2
Compared to an incorrect image, the Hamming distance is 15. The single matched character is effectively within the noise.

Hamming distance is a reliable metric for this hashing approach, and is relatively easy to compute if the hashes are all already calculated. That being said, we don't really want to do 18,000 x 16 charter-character comparisons in order to determine which card we're looking at. Instead we can use a binary search tree. There is a lot already written on binary trees, but the short version is this: by splitting space up one can iteritively narrow down the possibilities, rather than look at each candidate individually. It does require that you take the time to build the tree, but individual searches become substantially faster.

But wait, the Hamming distance doesn't provide coordinates in some searchable space, it provides a measure describing how two data are related (or not), but this can be thought of as a 16 dimensional metric space. The approach I've gone with is a vantage-point, or VP tree, chosen primarily since Paul Harrison was kind enough to post his Python implementation. The idea behind VP trees is to pick a point in your space, e.g. the hash "1111aaaabbbbcccc", and then break your member-set into two parts: those "nearer" than some cut-off Hamming distance, and those further out. By repeating this process a tree of relations can be built up, with adjacent 'branches' having smaller hamming distances than 'far' branches. This means that a hash you're trying to match can rapidly traverse the tree and only run direct comparison with one or two actual set members. The paper by Kumar et.al has an excellent explanation of how this compares with other binary-tree approaches, and while they were doing image-patch analysis, the content is still incredible relevant and well presented. Figure 2 in that paper, not reproduced here, is perfect for visualizing the structure of VP trees!

I'm still in the process of cleaning up code, but plan to shortly follow up with a video demonstration of the code in action, as well a few snippets of particular interest.