Spain, Arkansas & the Philippines Mission Plaque

 This is now the 3rd LDS mission plaque I have created.  Karla's Aunt had seen the plaque I created for my in-laws and asked me if I she could "order" one for her in-laws for Christmas. I was excited at the prospect...and even more excited when she told me one of the missions was in the Philippines.  At that point, I decided I had to give it a try-I had done Hawaii, how much harder could a few more islands be, right?

I woodburned all of the mission names by hand on the side panel below their respective flags. 

You can probably tell that the three mission shapes ranged in difficultly, with Arkansas being the easiest and the Philippines being the most difficult.  I'll had to admit that I didn't recognize Spain's outline, because I am so used to seeing it with Portugal filling in the gap on on the west coast.

  

 The Philippines was the great challenge of this project, but it was personally very fulfilling.  The tracing, cutting and assembling of the 30 largest islands took many hours over a period of a few weeks.  I wanted to be sure that if any Philippino looked at this cut out, they would be impressed with the accuracy of every island represented.  Go ahead and check a map!  The tough part of that is that most of these islands could hide under a quarter, many under a penny or dime-and islands don't lend themselves to any geometric corners or straight lines.  Needless to say, my fingers were within 1 inch of the scroll saw blade at any given time.  Many of the islands were so small that once the final cut was made to release them from the main block, they fell down into the interior of the machine and I would have to dig through the saw dust and recover them.  

I mounted all of the islands on a thin piece of poplar the same way I did with the Hawaii cut out I made in 2009 (posted previously).

 The flags were printed and mounted to small boards to elevate them from the side panel.

 I have used this scripture, Matthew 28:19 as the scripture for all three mission plaques thus far.  I have them engraved at a local trophy shop on a brass square.  It is exciting to see the influence a single family can have across the globe from missionary service.

This project gave me some extra confidence in doing some technically challenging pieces.  Overall, I am very pleased with the way it turned out. (Seen below without the shadowbox)