Anything handmade makes a great gift. Try making a board game to display and play.
In chess, two armies are arrayed against each other on an 8 x 8 grid. Each team includes 1 king, 1 queen, 2 bishops, 2 knights, 2 rooks, and 8 pawns (listed in order of relative heights), for a total of 32 pieces.
The king and queen, representing civic authority, are traditionally crowned. The bishops, representing religious authority, traditionally wear a “bishop’s” hat, called a mitre. The knight, rook, and pawn, representing special forces, defensive forces, and foot soldiers, respectively, are traditionally represented by a horse, a castle, and a simple, human-like form.
Your chess set can be as simple or as ornate as you want, can be made out of any material, and can be representational or nonrepresentational (as in Islamic cultures). For example, your rook could be a castle, or it could be a simple standing cylinder. Below are some ideas to get you started:
Wood
Your chess pieces could be as simple as painted wooden blocks of various sizes and shapes. Paint them in solid colors, or treat them as mini-canvases, creating detailed and ornate characters. Add detail by carving out hash marks or notches, or add upholstery tacks or small finishing nails. If you prefer cylindrical shapes over block shapes, use already-turned pieces of wood, such as the legs of a chair or the spindles of a staircase railing, as your starting point. Alternatively, use simple wooden dowels and turn them on a lathe yourself.
Metal
Nuts, bolts, washers, and other fasteners come in every size and shape you can imagine. So do pipes, pipe joints, copper fittings, and copper coils. Take a trip to your local hardware store and look through the massive variety of materials available for creative use.
Stone
The only real requirement is that each team be a different color and that the various chess pieces have the correct relative heights. There’s no reason the set couldn’t be composed entirely of semi-precious polished stones.
Other
Legos, empty spice jars, clay, electrical wire, papier mâché
Copyright 2023 Kesel Wilson (entirely, 100% human-created)
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Kesel Wilson 