Sun-burned Art

(Page 3 of 3)

July/August 1979
By the Mother Earth News editors 
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So . . . we're going to offer a ground breaker's challenge to all of MOTHER's readers. How about it, friend? Is anybody out there ready to develop a partor full-time moneymaker out of solar woodburning?

RELATED CONTENT

Tell us all about it if you do!

SOLAR SLOGAN BUTTONS

Although Jim Harless has certainly advanced the solar woodburning art, we have to admit that the Oak Ridger wasn't the first person to come up with the idea . . . because Dick Van Hoosen wrote MOTHER about his own sun-etching experiences back in 1974! (There may even be some more star-powered woodburners out there in the wilderness . . . you know how it is with an idea "whose time has come. This fellow's specialty was inscribing attractive cedar clip-on slogan buttons . . . featuring such messages as "Yer Sumpin' Eis", or "The Sunburn Kid", or "I Got Sol".

Dick got his start one idle afternoon in the days of Watergate, when he found an edge trimmed from an old door and-over a period of six hours-painfully etched: "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary . . . IMPEACH!"

"That first attempt at woodburning was a grand experience," Dick wrote us. "Etching with sun power required calmer nerves and finer physical control than anything else I had ever done. I soon found myself eager to try it again." And by the time Van Hoosen started an 18,000-mile hitchhiking trip a few months later, he had done solar carving again . . . and again and again. In fact, Dick was making such appealing sun-cut slogan buttons that he was able to barter the 3-1/2-inch-diameter discs to help keep his traveling expenses down to less than $300!

Dick only "set up shop"-to sail his products for cash--once during the journey. And on that occasion, he made and peddled five $2.00 buttons before an admiring sidewalk crowd in Hudson Bay, Canada . . . In less than one hour!

Mr. Van Hoosen told us-in his letter-that he was planning to expand on the moneymaking possibilities of solar woodburnirtg, but that was back in 1975 . . . and we haven't heard from him since. So, MOTHER readers, the "sun etch" field-seems pretty wide open.

Any takers?

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