This year, I participated in a Secret Santa for the Belgian maker community. You all know the basic idea, but instead of buying, people make something for their ‘victim’.

My instructions: the person I got assigned to was addicted to gaming, specifically Assassin’s Creed, and knitting.

I must admit the knitting scene is not all that familiar to me, and save from some yarn and needles I didn’t know any accessories that would be interesting to such a person. So – as usual – Pinterest to the rescue!

There I found this yarn bowl thing that stood out to me. I quickly came up with the idea of replicating the concept but in the theme of Assassin’s Creed.

I bought myself a nice bamboo bowl as a starting point and cut out a modified AC logo on the LAYZOR. I quickly realized it would be extremely cumbersome to try to cut out the logo of the bowl as-is, so I reluctantly decided to saw off a slice that would be much easier to handle. Then I transfered the logo to the wooden piece.

At this point I was still planning to use a scroll saw and manually saw the logo outlines, but doing some tests I noticed it would be very difficult to maintain acceptable cut consistency and finish quality. So, in comes the CNC.

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The CNC made quick work out of the logo, but the rounded surface forced me to use a long-flute endmill (of which the smallest diameter I own is a 3mm one). I finished the fine detail and inside corners with the scroll saw and a chisel.

I glued the slice back on as flush as possible, and added loads of bamboo sawdust to fill in any potential voids. Then followed all the sanding, sanding, sanding some more, and last but not least: sanding until the surface was as smooth as possible again. The glue seam is noticeable if you really look for it, but the bamboo pattern actually gave me a lot of leeway here.

In order to make the logo stand out even more, I decided to cut off a bit of wood from the backside of the bowl. This made it look a bit like the bow of a ship, which I really liked.

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The last step was some final sanding to get rid of any rough edges, and finishing the piece with walnut oil.

Maybe the most fun part of this whole project however was leaving the box on the doorstep, ring the bell and run :-).

If you’re curious, she seemed to love it judging from the comments on facebook. Oh and this is what I got from my Secret Santa: a guitar stand and 2 wall hooks. Very cool as well and is actually being used as we speak!