Who You Gonna' Call?

 

     Here we have a small wood end table, painted black that I picked up from a discount store for about $20. Like many other such items that I buy for the store with the intention of modifying and reselling, it sat in the back room for several years untouched. Finally it got bumped up to the front of the line, mostly because it took up too much space and I needed it out of the back room. 

     As I was more interested in clearing it out of storage than I was with creating something wonderful, at first I copped out and just slapped a pentagram on it to try to sell it and get my money back out of it (and the space it was taking up in my workroom). I stenciled and painted a gold pentagram in the center and put it out on the floor to sell, but even then, it didn't look finished. It stayed on the sales floor for about a week before inspiration struck and I knew what I had to do to finish this piece. I needed to make it into an ouija board. 

     I had long intended to start making spirit boards to pair with my planchettes that I was making and which were selling decently well. But I never managed to find the time to do the layout work to get started onn the project. The only spirit board I had ever attempted ended up getting stalled at around the 70% complete mark back in 1993 (and still remains unfinished to this day). I measured the table top and the pentagram and went into my vector image software to create a layout for the spirit board top. Normally I would use masking tape or make a paper template and cut the stencil by hand for something like this, but this time, I decided to use my newest toy, the Silhouette Cameo 4 vinyl cutter. After laying out the image design in Inkscape, I broke it down into sections small enough to cut out on my vinyl cutter and used it to cut the mask.  Once the mask was cut, the sections had to be properly positioned and transferred to the table top. The positioning was a bit tricky, but fortunately the vinyl masking is fairly forgiving. Then it was a fairly simple matter to paint and remove the stencil.

     This is the first spirit board that I ever completed and one of the last items I made for the store before it closed.