DIY gifts for my staff

The year is almost over, but I would be remiss if I didn't at least offer a recap of the project I managed to squeeze in at the end of the year. I had been thinking about making everyone on my staff some tree cookie coasters this year from a couple of branches that I had been saving for a while. Moving into the interim position meant I had to make a few more than expected but they actually turned out pretty nice.

A couple of them ended up as live edge slab coasters vs rings b/c of the size of the branch, but some of them were dry enough to stay flat so they worked out.

Notice all the extras that weren't quite right on the left side there.

Months in the making, and I still had to work late into the night a few days before I wanted to pass these out. Nothing like saving thing for the last minute.

I was getting pretty tired of these at this point. I made about 50.

All in all I thought these were worth giving, at least I didn't feel too stupid handing them out. No more so than I would have with gift cards at least.

So that's it for 2019, and even though I'm working on something fun right now my record of actually posting results is pretty poor right now. Hopefully the final projects are worth sharing. We'll see!

DIY Disney pin shadow box

Well, November came and went and all we did was spend Thanksgiving week at Disney having an amazing time. And it came at the perfect time, dealing with a ton of stressful work and school shit. Spending 6 days walking 10 miles a day and doing all four parks was the perfect way to decompress and have fun.

The kids had an absolute blast, and the boy got seriously into pin collecting. I would say pin trading, but it was more about spending his souvenir budget on every pin that caught his eye. The wife started us all out with some mystery pins to get ready for the trip, and while I ended up donating mine to the kids' trading efforts I did come away with a handful of pins I wanted to put up when we got home. Thankfully, I had a spare box sitting around from a while ago and some leftover foam, so I threw it together while we were recuperating from our early-ass flight back.

Looking at the blank box now, I can't believe I just butted the corners. Oh well. I liked the natural look of the wood at least so that would work fine.

Put some cardboard under the felt to give the pins something else to grab onto, trimmed and stapled in the foam and viola, one shadow box.

Going for simple, I drilled out a spot for a nail so it would hang flush on the wall.

And then the pins!

Two from the droid factory, one from the opening. 

Clearance pins from 2014, still $10 a pop. 

All the pins I bought were Star Wars-related (surprise), either for Galaxy's Edge opening or a sequence of older pins that were on clearance. We also built lightsabers (more on that likely later), and there was a pin from that.

I did trade for a couple of pins too. The only one that I kept from the mystery pack was the ziggystar-trooper. I particularly liked the "bummer" pin, even though the trip was the total opposite.

Good times. Fun to get some use out of something that's been sitting in the garage looking for a purpose. Now I just have to build two more for the kids.