scolba Entry 1 - Ravenclaw Sorting Plaque
The Process
My wife’s side of the family does a Secret Santa style gift exchange amongst the siblings and siblings-in-law. So rather than getting something for all, we end up getting something for just one individual. Most of the time, this ends up being a better, more meaningful gift, because we spend more time on it rather than just hitting the Amazon wish list.
So this year I drew my wife’s sister. As described in a post here asking for help, she is a nerd much like the rest of us, but her and her family’s nerddoom lies with the Harry Potter universe. She had been "sorted’ recently, so I thought it would be fun to create a house plaque for Ravenclaw.
As I started to research it, I landed on other details like the Ravenclaw Traits, the year of sorting, etc. After several iterations of design, scouring the web for free fonts and vector birds, and with help from several forum members and the C3D folks, I landed on what you see in the images here. Don’t blame them for the poor finishing, though. Thats all on me. 
Mistakes and Lessons Learned
Oh boy. So this could be a long post. So having purchased my S3XXL on December 8th, I really jumped in doing too much, too fast. Though, the vids from @KevBarn14 really inspired me to just get cutting, and I sure did. This was the first real design or project that I have done, and the learning process took me into late nights after the kids were in bed, which no doubt compounded some of my issues.
Really these are the big take aways from this project, though there is some overlap with some subsequent entries as well.
- 7.1875 != 7.375
- If you are really close to the edges on your stock, make sure its positioned correctly in the file, or you are going to run off the stock.
- V bits don’t need to be that deep to be effective for small details
- V bits can’t do it all
- I need more (bigger variety of) bits!
- Correct measurements of depth of stock is critical
- Spray lacquer isn’t a miracle worker
- The videos from my.carbide3d.com are great and will save you a lot of time if you start there rather than just jumping right in
- My planer is terrible
- Plan on using more stock than you think…something is going to go wrong.
- Plan Ahead - Big box stores, and even some specialty woodworker’s shops don’t have smaller bits available or in stock.
- I have a lot to learn
