e-fg-zine

the newsletter for wood crafters on-line

Issue #1
December 2002

Welcome to e-fg-zine's readership! I'm glad to have you with us.

I've got a lot to celebrate here at Faux Grain. That's a wonderful thing to be able to say during the holiday season. I hope you're having just as many things to be thankful for in this season of sharing.

Naturally, one of the things I'm celebrating is this very first issue of e-fg-zine, and the opportunity to share it with you (so, I'll turn down the music and let you get to it...)

All the best wishes for your wood crafting adventures,
Wendy Maki,
Faux Grain.

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE

Article: Martial Arts in the Workshop?

Tip: Filling wood an easier way...

Recommended books & links: Medieval and Celtic Design

Marketing your crafts on-line: Faux Grain is celebrating two new achievements!

Martial Arts in the Workshop?

by Wendy Maki

Aikido is a martial art that teaches not to resist or fight any energy that is presented, rather to welcome it and use it. We like to practice an aikido approach to sanding our wood projects.

(We wouldn't *really* recommend exercising in your workshop! Safety first, always!)

Wood has the natural property of becoming rough or fuzzy when it is dampened with water or a water-based products because the grain of the wood swells at different rates. Usually this is considered a negative and unwelcome thing. Certainly, if you have worked hard to sand a piece, it can seem that all of your effort has been undone when you experience this phenomenon, and have to sand the project again.

Instead of fighting it, you can work with this natural property of wood to achieve a finer finish more easily.

Simply dampen the cloth you use when you wipe off the sawdust between the various stages of sanding the project. Don’t soak the wood, just dampen it as you wipe off the saw dust. Of course, avoid dampening any glued joints. Let the wood dry before the next sanding. Usually, it’ll be dry by the time you’ve
finished some other task.

The wood dries rough, but the next sanding automatically removes that. Less and less roughness comes back each time you do this (unless you soak the
wood).

Basically, the water lets you get at the roughness that you can’t even tell is there, so it won’t surface later when you don’t want it to. How smooth your final finish is will depend on how many times you've damp- wiped between stages.

The most important damp wipe is the one just before the final sanding. If you damp wipe only once, do it before your last sanding. Don’t damp wipe after you’ve done your last sanding.

Try this out on some scrap wood first to get the feel for how much dampness to use. Sometimes, you'll find that the grain of a particular sample of wood is so contrary that this approach isn't very useful. Also, it isn't recommended for wood products that use glues, such as laminates, plywoods, and reconstituted woods. It works well with solid woods, especially pine which has a grain that gets rough even at the mere thought of dampness.

Filling wood an easier way...

Cut some pieces (about 2 inches square) of cardstock (a heavy weight of paper sold in stationery stores--it’s half-way between paper and cardboard) and use them like a putty knife to fill small holes.

The cardstock is stiff enough to hold its shape for a while as long as you aren’t using a really stiff wood filler (the tube kind is ideal). It'll shape and smooth the wood filler into strange nooks and crannies where putty knives won’t get into, and it'll keep your fingers out of the wood filler.

Even better, just toss the cardstock out afterward. Anyone who has cleaned dried up wood filler off a putty knife will appreciate that.

Recommended books & links:
Medieval and Celtic Design

With the current popularity of medieval and Celtic design, here's a few books and a link that may inspire you.

Early Medieval Designs From Britain: For Artists And Craftspeople. By Eva Wilson. 1987. ISBN 0-486-253406 You can use these early Anglo-Saxon designs for crafts as indicated in the book's front notice. Clear black and white designs of all types (patterns, animals, etc.) make it easy to trace or photocopy to use in your craft projects. This book is part of the Dover Pictorial Archive Series.
Celtic Knotwork. By Iain Bain. New York, Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. 1986. ISBN 0-8069-8638-7 This book shows how to graph out all kinds of Celtic knotwork patterns, with loads of black and white illustrations of the process. Color plates, and black and white photos also show original examples of the art.
Celtic Knotwork Font Here's one I can't personally vouch for (I haven't personally done business with this site YET), but it's interesting enough to let you know about it. clanbadge.com offers a unique software font that allows you to design Celtic knotwork patterns without the hand- graphing. The examples they show are really worth looking at.

Marketing your crafts on-line:
Faux Grain is celebrating two new achievements!

In the past month, Faux Grain added a new marketing resource center for crafters to Faux Grain's web-site. Since selling on-line is a new or on-going challenge for most crafters, the new section is just for marketing resources appropriate for small to medium craft businesses.
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Faux Grain has been Googled!

If I can do it, so can you.

Right now, Google is the single most important search engine listing a site can have.

Last week, (Nov. 29th 2002) I strolled over to Google, just to see if Faux Grain was indexed yet. I searched Faux Grain's most important keyword "woodcraft patterns" and, lo and behold, there was it on the first page of the results, at #7! And it was my first time out with Google!

Even better, Yahoo! now mixes Google results with its directory listings in its web search results, so Faux Grain showed up at #6 on Yahoo for an English language search for "woodcraft patterns." And it didn't cost a thing.

Google and Yahoo! too. What more could a craft site webmaster ask for under the tree?

I'm celebrating, but I can't take the credit for the result. I just applied what I learned from materials I got from Site Sell(TM). The great results
I've had using Ken Evoy's no-tricks approach to being search-engine-friendly still amazed me. There were no complicated formulas to apply, and it was really quite simple and straight-forward to do.

I learned how to construct a search-engine-friendly web site from Make Your Site SELL! 2002(TM), and from their free Affiliate Masters course in PDF [Right Click to Download] (it's not just for affiliate sites).

If you're looking to improve your own craft web site's positioning in the search engines, make sure to visit Ken Evoy's site. Heck, you just might save yourself
the cost of a review at Yahoo!

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