Although I have ceased scroll sawing and pyrography on a short term basis while I have a serious go at painting, I thought I'd just mention something that happened the other day. My wife asked me if I could make her a church and a building out of wood so that she could decorate it for Christmas.
Anyway, I'm always eager to earn some brownie points so I said, "Get me a picture of the type of thing you want and I'll knock you something up." All was quiet for the next ten minutes while she used her Kindle Fire to scour the internet, then she said,"Cancel that order, I've found what I want on Amazon and it is only £18."
I was slightly disappointed at not having a chance to display my scroll sawing and pyrography skills but at least it would save me the bother.
We are Amazon prime members which meant that the item came the following day and I was astonished. What she had managed to order was a small village consisting of a church, several buildings, a picket fence plus some trees. And what's more it had lights. It was made from plywood, with pyrography details and the quality was very good given that it was made by machines, probably cut out with a laser etc.
I just couldn't compete with that sort of stuff, to be honest, it would have cost me almost £18 for the wood let alone the time to make it. If I was to make it from scratch I guess there would probably be 100 hours work in it.
So what does this mean for scroll sawing and pyrography. Well it will make it much harder for anybody to make any money out of mass producing wooden objects because the laser cutters can do it much quicker. So, all we can do is concentrate on doing one off projects that are unique in design and have a bit of art about them. The more value that is added to the wood the better.
To this end, I have asked my wife to get me Dremel for Crimbo so that I can use it in conjunction with the scroll saw and the pyrography iron. I'm looking forward to doing a bit more scrolling and pyrography in the new year and making some stuff the laser boys can only dream about.
In the meanwhile, if you want to how I'm getting on with the paintings why not pop over to my challenge website and have a shufty.
Also I'm giving away one of my books, pictured above, for Christmas. It's the second book in "The Fishing Detectives series and is called Bun In The Oven. If you pop over to http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/267076 then type in coupon code VZ64V at the checkout you will get your free download.
If I don't manage another post in the next week, here's hoping you all have a merry and peaceful Christmas.
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