The manufacture of the tiles turned into a huge effort. Helen and I ended up hiring one of my nieces to assist in this. The main thing was the simply enormous and unforeseen amount of sanding the project required. Here you see the transition from a blank to a rounded, grain-filled tile to a primered piece, to a finished piece ready for decopaging. A good part of the reason for this is that the Lyptus is a very open-grain wood, and we wanted the tiles to be very, very smooth -- like the bakelite sets we enjoy playing with.

Though Lorien proposed this project in August, no work on any of the physical parts of the set got started until the beginning of November. Lorien spent a huge amount of time sifting through various screenshots, publicity stills, and tons of other Buffyverse pictures to find good images for the honors. As well, she had to find convincing symbols for the other tiles. Helen and I really started working seriously on this at the beginning of November, when we started construction of the tile blanks. We thought this would be relatively straightforward: cut, shape, and sand. Helen took the edges off the individual blanks using a Dremel and sanding down using progressively lighter grades of sandpaper (starting at about 120 or so and finishing with 320). As November stretched into the middle of December, we started making jokes about the Death March of Sanding. Helen says she now has favorite grades of sandpaper, which -- along with the split skin on her thumb -- stands as a testament to the simply staggering amount of work she and Lorien did on this, a true labor of love for all of us. Happy Hannukkah, Becky!