Where the Wild Things Are

My wife keeps horses at a nearby retirement Community. And near where the horses live, this Retirement Community has a large and pretty active dumpster facility. It's not uncommon for someone who has passed this world and unto the next to have all their worldly goods taken up to the dumpsters and "dumped". It makes for some interesting treasure hunting for the locals.

My wife casually mentioned the other day that someone had thrown away a leather chair - covered in Zebra Leather. I didn't give it much thought until I went over there to help out with some maintenance chores for the horses and I saw the chair. The Zebra leather was in pretty decent shape.

I'd previously made a couple of boards with palm leave pieces, so I thought I'd give the Zebra leather a try. I was able to salvage quite a few good pieces - but like most of the boards I make, the material itself (and not me) will determine what type of board, it's size, etc.

I wouldn't normally make a board out of animal hide, but there is a lot precedence for making crib boards out of animal type material (ivory tusks, deer antlers and moose antlers - to name a few), so it's not all that far fetched. The hide fits my general criteria of being unusual or interesting, so it seemed like a good fit. On a at least of a few of the boards, I will mix the Zebra Hide face with some Zebrawood.

I would never have gone out and actively looked to make a board out of an animal hide - but since this re-purposing the hide (it would have gone to the landfill), I was OK with it.

Post Holiday Wrap Up and New Templates

I actually sold boards on and after Christmas

Admittedly, the cribbage board business can be somewhat seasonal since the majority of them are given as gifts. Given that etsy is now a strong selling avenue for me, I pretty much expected not to see another cribbage board sale until next November, so I was bit surprised I’ve actually sold a few boards since Christmas. In fact, I sold a board on Christmas day.

Templates

Now that the holidays have passed, I’m selling templates again with one notable exception: I added a disclaimer letting people know I don’t have and I don’t use CAD machinery to drill my templates. My goal has always been to sell reasonably good looking templates with out the holes wandering all over the place.

I got the idea of making really small templates, what I will call micro-templates. I cruised around the web looking for ideas of how to squeeze a 120 point continuous track format into a very small area – say 5” x 5”. I found some interesting wrap around type drill patterns (from other crib board vendors) which I shrank down by about half to fit the micro-template paradigm.

I also came up with a bunch of new designs in the geometric section: trapezoid, Compact Ovals, Heart, star, race-track, and rectangle/triangle/square with tapered corners.

I’m also adding what I call SCT templates (Spiral Cascading Turns), where the number of turns equals the number of streets.

With all the new template designs, I up to 55 template designs – the trick now is to get caught up and drill them all. So I’d be increasing my current template count from 30 templates to 55+ templates.

In addition to the little freebies I include with the plastic templates I sell, I’m now throwing in a paper template (3 person continuous track) loosely based on the paper template Lee Valley sells on their website. You tack the template to the board material, us an awl to mark the hole center and then come back and drill the hole. I include 2 copies of the template – one to use and one to share.