The Fortune Tiki

Disclaimer: I have never done any woodworking in my life. As bad as these look, I think the message is what's important. Please be nice.

It occured to me a while back that many people love island themes. It just gives off a warm sensation. With Spring quickly approaching, I figured that it was appropriate to associate my usual happy advice with some sort of island theme. I realized that the best advice is advice you can take wherever you go, so I came up with the Fortune Tiki.

I found a smallish dowel that I got from Home Depot a while back for a failed project, so I decided to carve my tikis out of that. Unfortunately, as easy as it is to carve, it's also very fiber-like. Sometimes they fall to pieces in my hand! I'm going to start cutting them from real branches soon, but in the meantime, I'll use up that dowel.

The process is fairly simple: first I cut the dowel with PVC scissors (anything else makes it splinter. The tikis are about 3/4" to 1 1/4" in length. I then come up with a VERY simple design in pencil and carve it out. Then I use different color ink and a very fine fountain pen to ink the areas I want (sometimes the fibery texture causes it to bleed to different areas :( ) such as eyes, mouth, ears, etc. Then I use a BBQ lighter to do some pyrography on the outside, mainly to accentuate the features. After I scrape everything to a good hue, I stain them with plain Minwax stain.

Sorry about the terrible picture, but that's all I've got. Also, these are some of my worst "experimental" ones. I gave out all the nice ones.

The most fun about this is the fortune. I print out different fortunes on my computer and cut them to a desired size. Then I wrap them around the tiki, so you never know what you'll get. Usually the sayings are simple whimsical pieces of advice: "A broken heart is like a pebble in your shoe: shake it off, then move on." I then tie the wound up fortune with a piece of weird light-colored twine: it looks really tropical. I don't have any pictures of finished ones, but I'll be sure to put them up when they're done.

So, suggestions?

M

[ Edited by poptiki on 2022-10-12 04:51:32 ]

Well, alot of people seem to enjoy these, so it's not just some nutcase making these for no one. Anywho, due to their small stature, I can't take better pictures with the camera I have. Sorry about that.

Do you have a scanner you can lay them on? That works pretty good. I'd like to see what you've got there; the concept is pretty cool.

Welcome aboard, another very local Michigan person. :) Our ranks are growing.

Neat idea with the fortunes.

JP

Unfortunately, no access to a scanner until school starts again. I'm on break this week.