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This patriotic sign is nearly 16 inches wide. There are three layers. The back layer is painted white on top and blue on the bottom. The middle layer is painted red. The eagle is natural wood. I don't use paint very often on my projects but sometimes it just makes sense. If you completely paint this sign it could be hung outside. Add a name sign hanging from chains to personalize the front of your home. You could also add your street address. Thanks for all the orders yesterday. I am working to keep caught up but I think I am about three days out to complete all the current orders. Keep the orders coming and I'll keep cranking them out. Under the Hood: (This may get boring) Feel free to skip. When I first started doing the Personalized Ornament Patterns several years ago, I did them all by hand.
It was brutal. By December 25th my right hand and wrist would be almost useless from pain. It took dozens of mouse clicks to get one ornament pattern completed. I think the first year I did around 2,000 of the ornament patterns. I knew that if the orders grew the next year I would be in trouble. After a couple years of dealing with the pain, I started writing software to automate the process. Each year I have improved the automation and I am finally able to do an individual ornament with two mouse clicks. It still takes a while but I think I can do around 400 per day. That is almost double of the number I could do even last year. I am using a new(to me) scripting language for the automation this year. It is called AutoHotkey. This scripting language has been around for years. I have tried it a few times over the years but I never fully committed to learning the language until this summer.
That was one of the best decisions I have made. AutoHotkey is incredibly powerful for automating repetitive tasks. Right now I still have to copy each individual name and do the ornament patterns one at a time. My goal for next year is to feed the automation software the complete list of names in the order and let it generate all of the patterns in that order without any intervention. Looking forward to the future I hope to have everything online. You simply type in the names and the patterns are generated while you wait. My programming skills may not be up to that challenge. It will require a completely different approach. I know the right people to ask for help but I like the challenge of doing it myself. We will see how far I get. Improving automation is important for more than my pain relief. I want to keep these patterns at a price where most people can afford to cut them for their entire family.
I have several scrollers who take orders and sell the finished ornaments. If they had to pay more than a dollar for the pattern, they could not make a decent profit. They have to account for their time cutting the ornament and materials. I have no idea if anyone finds this interesting but I am a geek so for me it is how I spend my days. If you think this was bad you should see when my wife, daughter, and son-in-law go out to dinner. My son-in-law is a full-time programmer and web marketing guru. The two of us have put our wives in comas more than once. Okay, you can wake up now. The price is $1 per name with a 5 name minimum. I want everyone to have a chance to make these ornaments for family and friends. 100% satisfied with the patterns. Pay by credit card(secure Paypal), check, or cash. The patterns will be emailed to you after they are completed. Please allow up to a week for delivery. Ten letters and up gets pretty small. If you need to you can enlarge the patterns by 10% to make the interior cuts larger. No special characters are supported. I can get a hyphen in there but it looks odd. It has to connect the two letters so it does not just fall out. Hybrid table saw are a nice compromise between a contractor saw and a high-end cabinet saw. This Shop Fox gets decent reviews and won't break the bank for a small shop.
Novels are by definition fiction, and fiction is made up stuff. It doesn’t matter if you write gritty police/courtroom procedural stories, or invented world fantasies, it’s the same. None of it really happened. An argument can be made that even if you were writing a non-fictional account of something that really did happen, your description would only form one perspective and would be seen by others with firsthand knowledge as “fiction.” Still, no one writes in a vacuum. I write fantasy. The first books I’ve published are invented-world-fantasy, which is just about as out-there as you can get. I created a whole new world, which means I can make anything, anyway I want. I could implement Hollywood-Gravity if I liked. Magic can exist. Gods can recognizably walk among people. People don’t even have to be people, they can be something else entirely. Time doesn’t have to work the same as we perceive in our reality. I want. Given all this freedom one might expect far more creativity in the genre, and yet oddly, so many invented-world-fantasies take place in very similar settings most drawn from our own history.
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