Wooden World of Woodcraft Logo

I have wanted a good profile picture for my World of Woodcraft Facebook page for a while and since I joined Instructables I wanted a good profile picture for here as well.

I started to think about how to show the world and the woodcraft together and when I won an egg-bot recently everything came together. I knew what needed to be done. I knew that a wooden globe was going to be plotted and carved and on this globe the words "World of Woodcraft" would appear.

The one thing stopping this project was the font. I needed the perfect font to be easy to read and still have a nice handmade look to it. Thankfully creativemarket.com had me covered and I had a look through the fonts they offered. (by the way they don't just do fonts I highly recommend checking these guys out and being inspired.)
I found "Brush Serif - Collin" and fell in love. This is the font I have been looking for for a long long time.

So having everything I needed - I set to work!

Remember to wear a safety mask when using the lathe and any protective equipment which is recommended when using other power tools.

Most of the wood in my workshop at the moment is in planks and is not big enough for this project. I decided to use a big chunk of a tree which I thought would be dry enough as it had been sitting for 2 years. (As it turns out I was wrong. The standard thinking for wood drying is it takes around a year per inch I think I should have waited another 2 years)

If you are starting off with un-balanced material like a log you should start your lathe on a slow speed and take off as much of the un-balanced material as possible before working up to a higher speed. This will help reduce the ware on the tools bearings and make the whole job a little safer.

I took off the excess material with a roughing gouge.

It is possible to cut a ball only using standard wood turning tools.

I am lucky enough to have a ball turning jig which takes a lot of the hard work out of crafting balls.

I marked where I wanted the ball to be by using calipers to find the thickness of the cylinder. This measurement was transferred onto the wood to show where the balls ends would be. I then measured half way between these points to show where my high point would be - the widest part of my ball whilst in the lathe.

In order to be kind to my ball making jig I took away some of the material and made relief cuts to allow my jig space to work.

The real trick to making a good ball with a ball turning jig is the set up.

It is important to make sure the cutting tip lines up with the centers of your lathe, the drive center and point of the tail stock. Also make sure the tool is in line with the center line you drew previously for you ball.

Once you have everything set up reduce the height that you're cutting with each pass until you end up with a ball shape.

It is ridiculously easy in comparison to any other ways I have tried to make a ball on the lathe. Also a lot faster.
Leave a little bit on each side to hold everything together while turning.

Once you are happy with your ball shape cut it free from its supporting wood .

Use cups - one for your drive center and one for your tail center to hold your new ball with the raised sawed edges outside of the cups.

When you start the lathe again you can turn the raised bits away and sand everything smooth.

I used inkscape and photoshop for this.

Inkscape is free but photoshop is not, the good news is any graphic package can be used, and if you're a little better with inkscape than I am you could do it all in inkscape.

I found a black and white world map using a search engine and imported this into my graphics package I re-sized the image to around 1172 x 292 (this is around the right dimensions for the egg bot).

I then typed in the words 'World of Woodcraft' using that fantastic font from creativemarket.com - It's the font called Brush Serif - Collin.

I gave the text a white stroke to differentiate it from the background and placed it in the pacific ocean trying not to obscure too many recognizable land masses.

I had to get rid of a lot of the finer details given by smaller islands (Sorry Bermuda)

I flattened the whole map and saved it as a Jpeg. I imported this Jpeg into inkscape on a document set up for the egg bot and traced the bitmap using the 'trace bitmap tool'. This creates a good enough vector path for the egg-bot to follow.

From there I made a test print using an egg.
Huge success and part of a balanced breakfast.

Knowing everything was good to go I bit the bullet and set the egg-bot drawing the design I had made.

I started carving with a set of Faithfull carving tools. I found this to be a time and labor intensive job when I had an alternative in the workshop (Also my girlfriend didn't like that I was getting wood shavings on the carpet)

I have a lovely Foredom wood carving kit that I am getting to grips with. I found a few different burrs worked very nicely together to give detail and precision for letters and land mass as well as texture for the seas.

Once the carving was done I colored the land and letters in black permanent marker. This highlighted the text and made it a little easier to read.

I put a white sheet of paper on a table and put all the lights I could find on.

It would have been easier to ask someone for help or use a tripod but I get a little impatient when I'm crafting so I set a self timer on my camera pushed the button and then grabbed the ball. I wanted to position my hand in such a way to obscure the fact that I had forgotten to include the north and south pole land masses.

Once I had a photo I was happy with I cropped the image and played with the curves until I was happy. I did a little patching and cloning to get rid of cracks in the wood (note to anyone doing this if your using wood from a log it's best to wait as long as you can for the wood to stabilize... 2 years for a big chunk of Holly isn't long enough.)

I then added some text.
Its that amazing super useful, I'm going to use it on everything now I have found it font Brush Serif - Collin from creativemarket.com

I had a few different ideas for tag lines:

This is not a drill

Making things makes me interesting.

Being sexy is the thing that makes me sexy

Learning new things makes the world more interesting

because making things is a lot more fun than buying things

Because everyone deserves quality

Safe and competent

I still have all my fingers

Crafting and designing projects to inspire and entertain

I chose 'This is not a drill' and 'Crafting and designing projects to inspire and entertain'.

This is not a drill is a tip of the hat to word play and double meanings as well as The Treachery of Images by René Magritte one of my favorite artists.

I threw a black stroke onto the 'this is not a drill' text to make it look a little bolder than its sub text and saved before immediately uploading to my World of Woodcraft Facebook page.