Dispatches from the front (Pre-release report) Easter Edition

Time for a gratuitous Easter Bunny project :slightly_smiling_face:

Baltic Birch, 1/8" plywood.

I took a scrollsaw pattern, scanned it, traced it and then outlined it for a cut. After pulling it from the 'forge I used some paint markers to add a little color.

Quick little holiday tchotchke. For thousands of dollars and a few minutes, you too can create a $5 Michaels Craft :grinning: It doesnā€™t always have to be art :rofl:

47 Likes

Adorbs! (And @Tom_A likes your bunny.) :smiley:

7 Likes

Ha! That is how I think about most of the things Iā€™ll make on the GF. :slight_smile:

7 Likes

Perfect! Everybody seems to be gravitating to paint markers. Guess I need a set, huh.
Andā€¦ from one man to anotherā€¦

I like your bunny.

10 Likes

Iā€™m politically incorrect in associating bunnies with Easter :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

5 Likes

WTH is politically incorrect about bunnies now? (I canā€™t even keep up.)

5 Likes

Poor mans intarsia :grin:. seriously though, nice job showing another quick and easy project for our GFs !!

1 Like

Poor manā€¦ really ??

thatā€™s why I added the grin ! not PC certainly no disrespect meant !! (Itā€™s like urban slang for ā€œcopying a method or effect cheaply with not as professional effectā€) And well I love the project Iā€™m pretty sure @jamesdhatch doesn;t associate it with a nice multi wood colored intarsia project, ( sorry if any offense given) :no_mouth:

4 Likes

Didnā€™t pick up on your sense of humour quickly enough. But then mineā€™s pretty obtuse, anyway !
Just put it down to my still being half way through breakfast, and I havenā€™t taken all my pills yet. :smiley:
Regards
John

1 Like

I like your sense of humor! Itā€™s a cute puzzle. Those scroll saw patterns can come in handy for quick projects, although the tracing job can be nontrivial!

Easy-peasy with a scanner & then the bmp trace feature of any of the design programs. :slight_smile:

Cute bunnies associated with Easter encourages people to buy them for their kids who donā€™t take care of them and then they end up in shelters or let lose to fend for themselves (unsuccessfully) in the woods.

But until people boycott Disney and Bambi, Iā€™m not playing. Unchecked deer populations kill tens of thousands of people every year by leaping into the road, not to mention how many cases of lyme disease are caused by them living in too large a population too close to humans. But Disney made them cute so itā€™s not nice to shoot them and eat them.

4 Likes

I obviously donā€™t get out enough. :smile:

1 Like

Not to start anything ā€“ but actually I think it is the other way around. It isnā€™t the deer living too close to humans, but rather humans moving more and more into wildlife habitat that is the problem. Seeing this occur in many, many places ā€“ humans encroaching on wildlife habitat with their homes and neighborhoods so you end up with deer and elk (as well as predators such as cougar and bobcat and coyote) in areas where people now live. Some, like coyote, adapt fairly well to the new shared environment ā€“ others not so much. Species like deer, etc. left alone in their natural environments with their natural predators (who must also be left alone) balances out exceptionally well. It is, unfortunately, us who continually throws off the balance.

6 Likes

I heartily agree. We live in a forested area that is starting to see quite a bit of development. When we moved here, we were adjacent to 40 acres of undeveloped land. In the short time weā€™ve been here, 3 or 4 houses have gone up there and the wildlife is being displaced.

Thereā€™s a healthy population of HUGE coyotes out here (seriously - theyā€™re wolf sized!) and we used to hear them out on the back 40. As development encroaches, we see them in our pasture quite often ā€¦ even during the day. In the last few weeks, Iā€™ve found coyote (or fox?) fur in my backyard right up by the house.

Likewise, I spotted a baby bear while driving the other day. It was running through an area of McMansions that recently went up ā€¦ no doubt that area was habitat just a few months ago, but now everythingā€™s displaced. And if mama bear shows up in the backyard of one of those shiny new homes, you know sheā€™ll be viewed as the interloper.

/rant

6 Likes

Not exactly.

/pet peeve rant>
20k years or so ago Americas are full of animals. Humans move in. Animal populations decline precipitously. Not just the mega fauna.

500+ years ago original human populations decimated by diseases of the Eastern Hemisphere. Animal populations explode.

Europeans (mainly) expand throughout both continents. Record large numbers of wild animals. Everyone assumes this is the baseline. Then they promptly kill the predators and eat everything else. Animal numbers decline precipitously.

Laws are put in place to regulate hunting and otherwise protect species. Animal numbers of many species rebound nicely. They fill up their range and then they start to move into areas where they are not commonly seen. This happens at the outer edge first and the assumption appears to be weā€™re moving into their range, when they are probably moving into ā€œour range.ā€ Yes, cities expand, but they expand a section mile of development at a time, in other words, weā€™re expanding out much slower than they are. Also, for many species city living is easier and better than the country life and this is shown by higher population densities. Some animals donā€™t want to live in the woods.
/pet peeve rant>

I donā€™t believe the above changes how we interact with wildlife. They are there, there are more of them and when you average out the bad and the good it comes out more good. Iā€™m just saying the perception of us being evil towards animals because we build houses isnā€™t completely accurate.

3 Likes

I donā€™t think itā€™s a ā€œgood and evilā€ equation. Building houses is not bad or wrong, and there are times when itā€™s absolutely appropriate to cull wildlife (the antelope population in Northern AZ is one scenario that comes to mind). In between those extremes, thereā€™s a balance.

Yes, Iā€™ve seen that theory. It definitely assuages the conscience of a hugely expanding human population (I remember when I was young and experts thought our rapidly approaching population of 200 million people in the US was dangerously unsupportable). In 2006, we crossed the 300 million markā€¦

Having lived in small towns and rural areas (and one or two major cities) in The PNW for over 40 years, I have watched with my own eyes as human habitation swallows vast areas of formerly wild habitat (look at the drive between Portland, OR and Seaside, OR on Highway 26 in 1970 and then today as just one example).

I have seen people buy and build in areas that had never held homes before, and then complain when the deer and elk eat their gardens and the cougar gets their cat. I have watched people seeking a more remote life build farther and farther out, and then complain when the coyotes get their chickens. Yes, some wildlife move into new human populated areas because the foraging is good and the predators are few, but mostly we are encroaching more and more on their habitat. People in Colorado hunt prairie dogs because they call them vermin as the people move into areas that were once prairie dog habitat. People in Oregon struggle with cougars on the edges of growing communities as they build farther and farther out, reducing available territory and wild prey. People in more and more populated areas of Alaska run into moose in their neighborhoodsā€¦

I think we can tell ourselves that we manage things well, and work hard to assuage our insatiable expansionistic desires with those stories , but in truth we continue to grow at an untenable rate and arenā€™t very good at playing Mother Nature.

This is a great example of how our management messed things up, and returning things back to the way they were set things right in ways we never imagined:

6 Likes

[a haiku for every occassionā€¦]

it is not about
making great art ~ itā€™s about
art making life great

[someday Iā€™m gonna make it big in the cutthroat world of competitive haikuā€¦ I know my Glowforge will draw me closer to that goalā€¦]

7 Likes