Wood Craft Patterns Anyone Can Use

Valentine’s Day wood craft pattern

Hi, I hope everyone is having a happy new year. Valentine’s Day will soon be here, so I thought I’d share a Valentine’s woodcraft project. The idea is to make a string of wooden hearts that can be hung on a wall. Nothing is sweeter than handmade Valentine’s wood craft patterns.

Tools and supplies required: wood for the hearts, saw to cut the wooden hearts, drill with 1/8″ and 1/4″ bits, raffia, 2 yards of 1-1/2″ wide soft ribbon, 2 big wooden beads, and paints. You should be able to get beads, ribbons, raffia, and acrylic or spray paints at a local hobby store. Of course, you should think about what colors you want to use before buying anything. Going to the store in person to get these things might be helpful because you can look at the items together to decide how you like the color mix. The ribbon can be either solid color or plaid.

The project will be assembled as: bead-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-bead. Ribbon goes through the 1st bead and 1st heart, then to the 5th heart and 2nd bead. It is tied off at the ends and this provides a way for the decoration to be hung up for display. Raffia connects the inner hearts.

First, you need to cut 5 wooden hearts about 3 inches wide. Each heart should have two holes drilled in it. The outside hearts should have a wide hole on the outer side for ribbon and a small hole on the inner side. The inner hearts (#2-4) each have two small holes, one on each side. The small holes are for the raffia. Next, the hearts should be painted.

Once the paints have dried, tie the hearts with raffia. Use four 10″ lengths of raffia for this. Tie the raffia into bows and trim as desired. Finish the woodcraft by threading the ribbon through the wood beads and larger holes in the outer hearts (#1 and #5).

I’ll try to update this later with photos. I’ve been too busy to add this now, but I wanted to put the plan out in plenty of time for Valentine’s Day.

Wood craft patterns DVD: woodburning

Sue Walters is a professional in the wood craft patterns business who specializes in pyrography, or woodburning. We’ve seen already that video is a great instructional tool for woodworking, so I’m pleased to share the only woodburning instructional DVD I’m aware of: Ms. Walters’ DVD “Pyrography workshop with Sue Walters: Hawk Portrait“. I find her voice to be clear, easy to understand, and pleasing to my ears. It makes the DVD a joy to have. She takes you step-by-step through the complete process of making the hawk woodcraft pattern. To me, the tips and techniques for creating the desired shading levels for different parts of the woodworking project made it well worth the cost. This was one woodcrafting skill that I, as a non-artist to begin with, found challenging. Tracing an outline was easy enough, but getting detailed features and color depth inside those outlines to look right was another story. Ms. Walters provides several terrific pointers that I can apply to other projects as well, not just the hawk design featured for the DVD.

I can’t show the DVD itself here, but I can show a brief video she prepared about how to erase mistakes in woodburning. She provides us with a useful woodcrafting tip, and as a bonus you can see her instructional style for yourself and judge the quality of videos she produces. Erasing mistakes in wood can be hard, but it isn’t impossible as her video amply demonstrates. Ditch the sandpaper!

Addition to the woodcraft patterns site: supplies

A bunch of people have come the site asking for woodburning patterns like horse designs and other supplies to use with their woodcraft patterns. Therefore, I’ve opened a new page to the site with woodburning supplies, which includes transfer paper and the best inexpensive woodburning tool I’ve been able to locate. It comes with multiple tips and can be used for cutting, too. Remember that you can make your own transfer patterns from favorite photographs or other electronic images by printing them in grayscale and tracing the outlines onto wood with graphite transfer paper. The easiest thing to do first is to just burn outlines of animals, such as your cats or dogs, without trying to do intricate shading of the animal or the background.

I hope you like the new additions to the wood craft pattern site and happy holidays to everyone!

Great downloadable library of woodcraft patterns

If you’re itching to tackle new projects, it is time to find more wood craft patterns.  I found a source for a huge library of downloadable woodworking plans covering different types of woodcraft patterns for people with varying skill levels that I’m happy to share with you.

Click to see my favorite library of wood craft patterns

When I started searching for woodworking plans, I was definitely looking for complete designs so I wouldn’t struggle with project plans that weren’t clear or lacked instructions.  Like everybody else who is economizing these days, I had looked online for free woodcrafting plans.  The variety was limited and, what’s worse, some of the places offering “free woodworking plans” were actually linking me to a lot of wood plans that were not free (surprise, surprise).

Later, I came across Woodworking4Home. I had seen the logos for it previously, but I had the impression it would just be for the deck, shed, and furniture building crowd.  In fact, I was also looking specifically at wood furniture plans and I bought the package for that purpose.  After I got it, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it had a huge library with all types of woodcrafting patterns like toys, rocking horses, clocks, ducks, shelf displays, and bentwood boxes-as well as chests, benches, and cabinets-that could be downloaded as PDF files.  Some plans were relatively simple as good starter projects for newer woodworkers, while others were much more elaborate. The cost per plan was terrific compared with buying individual wooden craft patterns, too.

The woodworking craft patterns in the package were a fun way to sample different woodworking techniques. The library plans not only spanned different general categories such as wooden puzzles, candle stands, wood Christmas ornaments, rocking horses, toboggans, and wagons, but the plans also covered a variety of woodcrafting methods and tools.  Some exercises, like patterns for a springerle board and a wooden duck, called for wood carving.  Other woodcraft patterns, including plans for a teddy bear bank and a waddling duck, showed how to make woodcrafts with non-motorized motion.  (The duck used a steel hex nut as a drive weight. It will work in a power outage and doesn’t need batteries, either!)  Bentwood box plans required bending wood, and the plans included tips with pictures for how to do this.  Easier beginner woodcraft plans included simpler rectangular boxes and a raised letter plaque.  Naturally, the plaque plans included templates for all the letters of the alphabet and numbers 0-9 so that I could easily customize a sign.  The library also had a very attractive arbor bench, fireplace mantels, and some nice looking media centers and cabinets.

The general woodworking tutorial help available with the package definitely saved me some time.  I was having trouble with some of my wood not staining evenly, but I found a new technique in their tips that solved this problem.  Woodworking4Home also came with extra bits of helpful information such as the properties of different glues for wood, how to properly use wood plugs (including why to cut your own), and how to use a starting pin to help with routing an irregularly shaped piece of wood.

Click here to see the Woodworking4Home site

Note: the library files in Woodworking4Home are too large to download with a slow internet connection, so there is also an option to get the information on a DVD.

Wooden craft patterns: complete the cube-inside-a-cube

Here, we’ll build on the cube-inside-a-cube wood craft patterns that we discussed earlier.  You’ll need to be familiar with Steve Marin’s YouTube video that we included, so take a look at it if you haven’t already.  The most basic option to finish the piece is to apply a simple oil finish.  Another option is to add a woodburning pattern, and then finish it.  Woodburning can be used to add style and some color to this woodcraft while preserving its mystique.  By this, I mean ensuring that it still looks to anyone viewing it that it was cut from a single wooden block-which it was.

I can suggest a few different ways for using woodburning to enhance these wooden toy patterns.  The first is to woodburn the outer cube, but only along its edges.  Lines can be burned at each of the straight edges of the cube and along the cut circles on each face.  You may want to try using a ring about 1/16″ wider in diameter than your cut circles as a stencil to make your circles even.  The second general strategy is to apply woodburning to the inner cube.  This is easiest to do before releasing the inner cube with the knife.  Or, if you are going to trace or draw patterns on the inner cube at least do this part before cutting the inner cube loose.

One approach to burning the inner cube is to just color all the surfaces solid.  The inner one can be as dark as you like; only the outer cube really has to be light for these woodcraft patterns, assuming you want to be sure everyone knows it was cut from a single block.  Another is to make the inner cube look like a wooden die, i.e., one face has 1 dot in the middle, another has dots in 2 corners, etc. up to 6 dots.  You could paint the inner cube as a die, but I don’t think this would look right unless you also paint the outer cube as well.  Dots are a convenient design for the inner cube because they’re so easy to add.  The outer cube may not always allow you to hold a woodburning tool at exactly the angle you wish and the dots can be added simply by stippling.

My favorite finish to our country wood craft patterns: put letters on the inner cube to make it look like a child’s wooden play block.  This can be done by burning either the letters themselves or the background, i.e., the letter will be unburned and stand out from the darker background.  Leaving the edges of the cube clear makes it simpler to free the inner cube without mucking any of the dark woodburning patterns you’ve already put into the block.

Again, many things can be done!  You could also burn angel and Christmas tree designs onto the inner cube and turn these into Christmas wood craft patterns if you like. As described earlier, you could print a simple design in grayscale from a computer printer and use that as the tracing pattern.

Other ways to personalize wood craft patterns

There are many ways to personalize wood craft patterns, even those “canned” projects made from purchased woodworking patterns.  We briefly discussed one method already: woodburning.  Another obvious way is in your choice of stain or paint color scheme, if you use any.  The choice of what type of wood to use will also affect the final appearance of your work.  If your woodcraft is made from multiple pieces, you don’t have to use the same type of wood for each part.  Bubinga, maple, walnut, mulberry, satinwood and cherry have distinct natural colors that you can combine to create multicolored wood crafts without painting or staining anything.

Wood craft patterns can also be customized by accessorizing.  Bonus: if you have a significant other who enjoys shopping but doesn’t care for woodworking, this might be a good way for you both to enjoy working together on decorative woodcrafts!  This also can be done either simply and cheaply, or can become a more involved process.  For example, wood snowman patterns can easily be accessorized by adding brooms for them to hold or scarves to wear.  Rocking horse plans can be spruced up by adding manes and tails made from horse hair.   If you want to go whole hog with this, Rocking Horse Memories offers saddles, stirrup irons, and even glass eyes.

When it comes to adding personal touches to your wooden craft patterns, the only limit is your imagination (or your budget)!

Add woodburning to your woodworking craft patterns

Woodburning can really add character and personality to wood craft patterns.  Woodburning, also called pyrography, is the art of etching writing or designs into wood (or leather) using a heated tool.  Woodburning projects, like other wood crafts, can be either very simple or quite elaborate.  Luckily, some basic techniques that can enhance wooden craft patterns, such as texturing object borders, do not require any special artistic ability.

The easiest woodburning patterns and the first ones everyone tries are stippling designs and handwriting. Basswood and poplar are nice woods for trying these pyrography methods.  Bear in mind that different types of woods will color and burn a little differently, so once you have a particular project in mind be sure to try a test part of your wooden craft pattern on a sample block of the same wood type.  This is especially important if you want to vary the darkness of the color shading in your woodburning pattern.  Of course, it is easier to make two color (unburned and burnt to a crisp) objects like signs.

Tracing designs and then burning the lines is another possibility, and the next step up in woodcrafting technique. If you do this, be sure to use graphite transfer paper and not just any old carbon paper you might have lying around. You don’t have to buy patterns to try this. You can make any simple design from geometric shapes, such as a simple sun, in software like Powerpoint (or search for one online). You can next print your pattern in grayscale and trace it. Photos can also be printed in grayscale, of course, so a similar strategy can work to make your own animal designs, such as horse woodburning patterns. The woodburning supplies page has good resources for more patterns from professional woodcrafting people.

A simple, yet effective use of woodburning to enhance wood craft patterns is to add texture to borders of objects such as wooden picture frames.  This woodburning application is great as a starter project for the artistically challenged among us since it isn’t too complicated and you can generally hide any little mistakes you might make along the way.  The color shading doesn’t have to be exactly right and you don’t have to trace lines or stencil patterns onto your wood.  Erasing mistakes from woodburning patterns can be tricky.  What is great with these starter patterns is that it is usually okay if you accidentally make a groove just a little wider or deeper than intended.  You can generally just work with it since the borders will be a bit irregular anyhow by design and no one will ever have to know you goofed!  You can also just add writing, such as names (“Bill and Judy”), to the bottom panel of a frame.  

A spoon tip is a good choice to use for woodburning if you want to pick just one, since many wood burning designs can be completed with it.  You might enjoy YouTube as a quick and convenient resource to get some ideas for wood craft patterns and pointers on woodburning techniques and blades.  Some of the pyrography works showcased there look very nice.

Wood craft patterns: cube inside a cube wooden toy

To me, great simple wood craft patterns are unique, attractive, and not trivial-but of course not too hard or expensive to make, either. A cube within a cube wooden toy cut from a single block of wood is a prime example of what I mean. Steve Marin made a wonderful video (below) that really is self-explanatory and covers all woodcrafting steps from start to finish. You don’t need a fully equipped pro shop to create it; a drill press and knife are the only tools required.

A few general tips are in order for this project. First, avoid starting with material that has knots or sappy spots in it.  Second, as Steve discusses at the end of his movie, once you’ve made it you want to be careful how you finish it.  Don’t put anything too dark over it or else people might think that you just made the inner cube first and then glued the outer cube together around it.  I suggest testing the finish out on a sample block of wood first. The intrigue of this country craft is the mystery of how it might have been made-at least for those who haven’t seen the the video! Third-and this should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway-wear eye protection so you don’t get splinters in your eyes and watch your fingers around the drill press. Working with wood craft patterns should never require a trip to the emergency room!

In a later post, I’ll discuss other options for finishing this piece by adding a woodburning pattern.  This can make your wood craft designs a bit fancier if you like and can be added to this project while preserving the visible grain structure in the wood for the outer cube. Again, this is important or else people will tend to assume that you glued the outer cube together around the inner one.

Steve Marin’s video for cutting the cube inside a cube from a single wooden block. Wooden toy patterns make nifty wood craft projects and this particular one requires only two tools to build (drill press and a knife). YouTube can be a good place to get wood craft ideas-take a look and see what you can find!

Wood craft patterns for all occasions

Wood craft patterns of all kinds are available to help you make your own crafts for everyday use or as custom gifts for others. There are patterns for very artistic crafts, wooden toys, wood carving projects, and simple rustic knick knacks for decorating your home or garden. Easter and Christmas tend to bring out the decorator in many folks (my Jewish friends excepted, of course), so most if not all hobby stores provide a few cute seasonal Easter and Christmas wood craft patterns, including wood Christmas ornaments. The most elaborate wood crafts can be quite intricate and require advanced skills to make.  I’ve seen some absolutely gorgeous works made with mixed media by some fantastic artists.  Fortunately for the rest of us, attractive wood crafts don’t have to be too elaborate or require truly special creative abilities to make. In fact, simple wood crafts can be among the best in my opinion. My Mom’s favorites by far are wood cow crafts. Actually, I think anything in any medium with a cow will do.

Primitive wood craft patterns can be enhanced tremendously by incorporating basic wood burning designs to add texture or color or both. This is a good bang-for-the-buck way to give character to basic designs and to put your own stamp on almost anything you’ve made from premade wood craft patterns.  We’ll also discuss some other ways to customize your designs.

I hope you enjoy the site and that it can provide you with a little inspiration.