A new prayer group has formed in the parish. There was a commissioning service last weekend. We gathered together a kit for each of the members to assist them in their ministry. They got a nice swag bag, a brochure for guidance, several prayer books, several prayer cards, a cool prayer journal (with the double spiral bound but the cover was already pretty cool to begin with), a cross and a candle.
Here is a version in Proofgrade acrylic. The cross is seven inches high and the friction fits into the base. The votive stand has three legs that go into slots on the inside of the ring and are held in place by the force of the votive.
I did a big production run of 20 crosses on Saturday using the chemcast acrylic. That was about ten hours straight of cutting and engraving. Makforge didn’t miss a lick the whole day. I wasn’t able to get the votives completed. They needed a little attention as the slots were a bit too weak and could break. I also needed to put the dog bones in the corners to ease stress. Will have to try the annealing sometime.
The crossed turned out great and I worked on the votives this week and printed half of them last night. the best thing is that I think I finally understand how the clone and tile function works in Inkscape!
Now I’ll have to figure out what to do with the circular cutouts. Perhaps custom print button escutcheons to give out at Maker Faire.
I did an engrave on the base with the names of the group and the parish. On some of them I used blue acrylic to fill in the engrave while the masking was on, squeegeed it off and then applied another layer. Three layers really are necessary to get a good even coat. (Normally I use the Oxford comma, but I made and exception here.) Just couldn’t get all the bases painted. The white looked ok too.
I had been thinking of a cross design for quite a while and just couldn’t come up with something appropriate.
Then I looked in a mirror and saw this: [photo to come. iPhone updating so I can’t access it! 30 minutes to go!]
And then did a little work in Inkscape to produce the following. It is for 1/4" clear Proofgrade acrylic.
Played with the votive stand for a while. Originally I was thinking of a wood box one that is normal, and then I realized that I didn’t have enough wood. But acrylic I have loads of. I started off by putting the legs on the outside and didn’t even finish the other two legs when I remembered that glass holder trick and the pasta cutter trick: use the internal core to provide a key to keep it all together.
I’ll post the file of the vigil stand tonight after I put the tweaks I made to the design onto the Proofgrade version.
The techniques required were understanding boolean punching out/differences to get the closed vector paths for engraving the fill. There are loads of Celtic crosses online, but getting one without clipping paths and layers is a challenge. Easier for me to start from scratch using circles and rectangles.
The other thing was once again to calculate kerf for the 1/4" acrylic. I had a pretty good guess to start with, but I needed to make two trial squares to test the tab and the slots to get the right fit. Slots are interesting because you have different kerf adjustments to make. None on the for the horizontal because that’s the thickness of the acrylic, but two on the vertical because you are adjusting for the cross and for the base cuts.
