The city of Pacific Grove has over 700 "Historic Home Plaques" sponsored by The Heritage Society. The inspiration for this project was to bring these plaques to Candy Cane Lane, with a holiday theme as requested by staff member Sally Richmond.
The majority of the project lay in designing the sign. I wanted to have various holiday elements on the sign while staying true to the original plaques in Pacific Grove. My initial design featured a holly border with customizable text in the center. All of the elements were drawn from scratch using the "spline" tool.
The design was approved by Ms. Richmond after making some minor changes to the text.
Primary testing succeeded without issue. All of the elements, including the newly added candy cane, were machined smoothly and considerate of later painting phases. With this, I was ready to machine my first "draft" of the sign.
The sign was machined on the Tormach 24R and painted using a series of steps involving various masking and revealing techniques. First, the entire stock was painted green and covered in a sticky mask. Then all of the red elements were engraved and painted, before drying and being covered once more. The process was repeated with all of the green and unpainted elements, until the draft was completed and the mask could be removed.
The results were satisfactory, with no major and some minor visual imperfections occurring. I was the OK to continue on to my final draft.
For my final draft, the process was repeated, but I used wood handpicked by Ms. Richmond, and allowed the paint more time to dry after applying it with extra care. Additionally, some of the text elements were altered to include the year of the homeowner moving in instead of the address.