We made some Halloween themed activity boards for kids. Bats, Ghosts, and Pumpkin, with engraved details and “dimples” to place colored wooden balls in.
Process: Making these shapes were the most difficult part. Lots of arcs were created, and deleted at nauseam, using the Create Curve tool. Man that thing is hard to use to create a continuous shape. The pumpkin was made using a series of overlapping ovals, the bat was just some arcs and triangels, and the ghost was actually traced in Inkscape (free Photoshop alternative) and imported as an SVG. I literally tried 100 different “ghosts” using the Create Curve tool and could not even come close to a shape resembling a ghost. So I took a picture of a ghost from our Halloween decor and traced it in Inkscape!
Once I had a final design made, I’d offset the whole shape by 1/4" Outside, and Fillet all corners to 1/4" radius to create a large enough boarder that would accept a 1/8" round-over. I then engraved the original design with a 60-deg V-bit, doing 2 passes to clean up any dust/fibers that got left behind.
Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned:
- The bat “tail” constantly broke off or chipped because I had the radius too small to begin with. I increased the radius to decrease the sharpness of it which helped a lot.
- Pumpkin shaping took forever to make the pumpkin not look like mush.
- Dimple-spacing took a lot of trial and error to fit exactly 10 balls and still have it look “good”. Not orderly, but not totally random.
I created a separate paint tumbling machine to mass-paint 1/2" wooden balls for another project, so I was able to paint all the balls used here with relative ease. Previously I’d shake a bunch in an old plastic container, dump on a baking sheet, and hit it with a heat gun on low. Do that 5 times and you get some really nice colored balls!
The kids LOVE these things.
bat_pumpkin_ghost.c2d (1.5 MB)