ICU Christmas Ornaments
Laser-cut wood ornaments and hand-poured epoxy gingerbread men made as a small holiday thank-you for MICU staff — delivered in a joke "gift shop" box.
Every December I try to make something small for people who deal with the actually hard stuff, and this year that meant the staff on the Medical ICU (MICU) — so I made a little batch of Christmas ornaments stamped “25” for the year and handed them out as a low-key thank-you.
Two techniques, one holiday: laser-cut wood Christmas trees (a good excuse to burn through some butternut, Baltic birch, and maple offcuts before they warped past usable), and hand-poured epoxy gingerbread men, which was really an excuse to finally learn some resin tricks I’d been meaning to try.
The gingerbread men took two attempts to get right. My first master was hand-sculpted from air-dry clay, and clay had other plans — it cracked, shrank, and came out porous while drying, which is a bad combination right before you make a mold off of it. Attempt two used paraffin wax instead, which held detail cleanly and let me deliberately rough up the surface for a sugar-cookie texture, instead of fighting an accidental one.
I delivered the whole batch in a cardboard “gift shop” box that took about two minutes to build, hand-labeled “Generic Tree Decorations — made with ‘love’ and LASERS! and chemicals,” complete with a joke pricing scale that escalates the way hospital bills apparently do: first one free, second $5, third $50, fourth $500, fifth… plus $1. MICU humor, delivered accordingly.
