The Mine Shaft Gap

When your spouse’s birthday coincides with Mother’s Day all the time (or usually within a week), this can present gift planning challenges.
However, in this case I was prepared in advance and timed things just right.

Some time ago, we found a copy of an antique board game on eBay, and were quite surprised when we successfully secured this for about $20. The BGG content on Courtship and Marriage pretty much all comes from me, drawn from a visit to the National Archives in Canberra, where this and other antique boardgames were on display, and also from an entry in the online catalogue of the National Library of Australia.
The game is just a roll-and-move, simplified variation on Snakes and Ladders, but the various action spaces provide an amusing insight into idealised early 20th-century courtship rituals and attitudes (eg., “Croquet Party: Advance to Engagement”).

So I finally got this mounted and framed. It is not yet hanging on a wall, but here’s what it looks like…

The second gift was inspired by two things: 1. My wife’s continued interest in the game Carcassonne, and, 2. A chance observance of a cool picture posted on BGG by user Ncik.
So I contacted Ncik (Nick Reed in the UK) and asked him about the possibility of doing a custom job with the view to creating a unique gift idea. After three weeks of discussion and experimentation by correspondence, together we created the final image, rescaled to fit printed on an A2 poster at 300dpi (a 28MB jpg file). I say “together” because this was a joint effort. I created the core image layout in a 3×21 tile strip and advised Ncik of what 3D pattern I’d like overlaid, while Ncik provided his programming expertise and creativeness to apply the pattern to the derived image.
It was a complete experiment, because although our earlier tests appeared successful, and we believed the result would work, we would never be absolutely sure until we saw the final production.
I was delighted with the result when I picked it up from our picture framing shop late last week - the experiment had worked.
Again, the picture is not yet hanging on a wall, but here is what it looks like. In fact it is still wrapped in cellophane here, and I took the picture from an angle to minimise the reflection of the flash. However, if you persist with this (click to see it at 800×600), you can actually make out the 3D stereogram effect in this picture-of-a-picture…