For Father’s Day this year I wanted to make something special!
Growing up, I always remember random piles of mystery objects from my Dad’s pockets appearing in the house. As a carpenter he’d always end up with trinkets from his days work, and in a way, these little collections of objects told stories of what my Dad’s day involved.
Thinking about this, I wanted to make a little home for these bits and bobs to go. Here’s the finished piece:
The tray itself is a bog-standard boxes.py generation, with the back plate modified, and all the other shapes made with Adobe Illustrator.
All of the colours and designs were created using sublimation, my new favourite thing ever. Even just making the arrows a solid yellow - printed out a square of yellow on the printer, boom! Illustrations were done on Photoshop, and made into a pattern on Illustrator.
The technique:
The long and short of sublimating on wood is to coat the wood with polycrylic after it’s been cut (and sanded), let it dry for 2+ hours. Sanding after it’s dried is sort of optional but must be very light- I generally skip sanding, you get a much brighter finish, but the polycrylic can make the wood a tad fuzzy. Heatpress your design at 190c / 375f for 90 sec. I give it a spray of clear matte sealer after too.
A bit about my wood sublimation experiments prior:
Others online have suggested using sanding sealer as a coat, as it’s cheaper and faster-drying, but it turned out awfully (even with my Dad’s instructions, haha). It just bakes the wood when it gets heatpressed and looks terrible. If anyone knows why that happens I’d be curious to know!
I really like how the wood colour comes through but I’ve done a quick experiment with priming the surface with white before (since we don’t have white ink) and that works pretty well too.
So that’s that! If you have any questions feel free to ask me here or if you see me about or whatever. If there’s interest I’d be happy to do a little workshop maybe! 
Can’t wait for my Dad to open his gift on Sunday!
