Bill and Ted’s Excellent Phone Booth Tree Topper

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Phone Booth Tree Topper

“Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” custom phone booth:

Bill and Ted phone booth Christmas Tree Topper

“Be excellent to each other” should probably replace the golden rule at this point, and around the holidays there is no better phrase to live by — so much so, we wanted Bill S. Preston, Esquire, and Ted “Theodore” Logan to be our Christmas tree toppers for a few years.

While the most excellent set of Bill and Ted collectible figures exists on the market, the phone booth in the box is made of cardboard and is definitely not bodacious, and wouldn’t be good enough to grace our tree.

Bill and Ted with their cardboard phone booth

Using reference photos from the movies, prop makers who have built their own replica, full- size booths, and the cardboard version, I designed a phone booth to be made from acrylic.

Design was made in Adobe Illustrator.

The acrylic was purchased from Delvie’s Plastics, and it was cut on the laser cutters at Nova Labs, a makerspace in Reston, VA. Weldon SCIGRIP 4 was used as the solvent to assemble the box.

Ring of LED lights for the top of the phone booth

An additional 3D printed component was designed in OnShape, made to hold small “Lilypad” LEDs (these are great as they have a resistor already in the circuit and run on up to 5v making USB power bricks usable).

Inside the phone booth are shadows of Abe Lincoln, Napoleon, and Socrates. These were printed on a Prusa i3 mk3s with a 2 color print in PLA.

Abe Lincoln, Napoleon, and Socrates

STL models for the figures were adapted from the following people, and were combined in Blender:

Links to some of the items used

Here’s a list of the products used that I purchased from Amazon (affiliate links below):

An acrylic phone booth depicting Bill and Ted and their time traveling machine.

And just so I have it handy, here’s the post on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/B6YOSB5FSm1/

Slotted Christmas Ornament test

Finished Christmas ornament
Finished and assembled Christmas ornament

Last year our team made (well, I made, but the team hosted the decorating party) slot-together Christmas trees for our internal clients.

We wanted to see if there was something else to make them in 2015, so we brainstormed over email. Someone presented a sketch of a Christmas ornament shaped item, and knowing I can whip out this sort of thing I went ahead and made the prototype. Plus, I hadn’t actually cut anything from this particular shade of red 1/8″ acrylic, so it was a good test.

In the end we didn’t do anything because of heavy workload in December, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

Oh, and I hope the Brand folks at work don’t see sad Inky made from the scrap cutouts. It is definitely not on-brand!

 

Christmas Tree cut outs – decorated version

Finished Christmas Decorations

The big plan for the Christmas Trees from early December was to let my kids decorate them. We later decided to give them to all of the grandparents for Christmas; I was able to snap a few photos before we wrapped them and hit the holiday road.

Here they are. I’ll let you guess which one the toddler decorated, vs the 4-year-old!

 

Finished Christmas Decorations Finished Christmas Decorations

 

Slotted together Christmas Trees and Snowflakes

A collection of laser cut slot-together Christmas TreesA week and a half ago, I created a slotted together Christmas Tree decoration as a test. My older daughter saw it and asked if she could decorate it, but I couldn’t let her as I needed it for work. Given how easy it was to create, I went ahead and made her several more to color.

These were laser cut out of not-quite 1/8″ lite plywood. The Christmas Trees are 6″ tall, and the Snowflakes are 4″ tall. The flat ones were jammed into the open spaces on the sheet of wood so I didn’t waste as much material.

The items were downloaded from Shutterstock as they had several vector graphics containing multiple Christmas Trees, so I’d only need to buy one image. Same with the snowflakes. I looked for ones with simple, symmetrical designs.

If you want to make these, here are the steps (it’s really simple):

  • Size the tree to whatever you want in Illustrator, Inkscape, whatever…
  • Measure the thickness of your material.
  • Make a rectangle that is half the height of your tree, and where the width is the thickness of your material (in my case, 3″ x .11″).
  • Center align the tree and rectangle.
  • Duplicate the pair of items.
  • On one, ‘bottom align’ the tree and rectangle. On the other, ‘top align’ the items.
  • Use the pathfinder options to remove the rectangle from the tree, and you’re done.

Go past the jump for more photos:

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Christmas Stocking Hangers

Christmas Stocking Hangers

Christmas stocking holders on mantle

It is the beginning of September and Christmas creep is in full swing. Craft stores already seem to have supplies out for all of the major 4th quarter holidays – I guess crafters like to plan ahead and be prepared?

Not me – I had just completed my laser cutter safety course at Nova Labs, and this was actually my first project just 2 weeks prior to Christmas, 2013.

5 pieces of art for Christmas stocking holders

Here are the details:

  • Material is 1/2″ thick oak, which was very slow to cut and had a lot of charring.
    • We actually liked the contrast of the blackened edge to the lighter wood and didn’t bother sanding these at all.
  • Art was created in Illustrator, from a mix of sources:
    • Reindeer was a simplified tracing of a small figurine we purchased in Copenhagen in 2009.
    • Snowman was more-or-less made from scratch.
    • The snowflake took inspiration from other vector snowflakes online.
    • Tree was straight from a Shutterstock vector library of Christmas trees
    • The ornament was a slightly modified Shutterstock file.
  • The base was designed with a notch to match the thickness of the wood hook.
    • Despite not really accounting for the laser kerf, it pressure fits in and doesn’t need glue or other fasteners to stay put.

Overall my first project went very well, with no problems that I can remember. We loved that these matched our style much better than anything we found online. I guess that’s the entire point of making.

Check out a PDF of the more original artwork.Christmas_Stocking_Hangers_2013-12-09

Assembly of Christmas stocking holder base
Assembly of Christmas stocking holder base.

Comparing snapshot of reindeer figurine to simplified outline
Snapshot of a reindeer figurine and the simplified outline of it.