Yes, it is the annual Passover Seder maker extravaganza post. This year we are doing two combo projects (both with lasers!) between the Glowforge and EufyMake UV printer.
Name Card Project
As usual the place cards are the big project for production, and while this year’s crowd isn’t by far the largest we’ve had, we still are having 27 people. One item my projects have always had as an issue is that 3D printed projects take a while to print, like the Nefertiti heads several years back which were 5-color prints took like 4-5hr each, so when we had last minute guests (was still adding 2 people last night!) it was almost impossible to make quickly, so being able to whip a spare out last second is useful, and I always try to use my latest maker toy, this year being the Eufymake UV printer. Originally I was planning to do ceramic magnets (similar to the ones that come with the printer) except… Basically they are unobtainable, and I finally found a vendor (on Etsy) that sold similar 3x2” ceramic magnets, but they didn’t arrive until this week, which was too late to begin the place card manufacturing. So I chose an alternative media, which were bamboo (not Bambu - I’m a Prusa guy) business cards, these are from amazon. They are 3x2x0.07” in size. I quickly made a jig to be able to quickly produce them without having to worry about positioning (I mean it’s a rectangle hardly worth discussing). And put down a high res scan of matzah, and the name was done inside the EufyMake studio making the text the default 2mm raised (honestly it was accidental but looked cool and only added about a minute). So they came out like this:
While the line of where I tiled the scan is obvious in the photo (that is in reality tiny). Not bothering with a banana for scale since everyone has seen a business card before. I got a set of nice self adhesive magnets for the back, and they stick well to things. Anyway, takes about 10 minutes to do one if we get any other last minute folks. And since they are cured as soon as they come out of the printer you can immediately use them for REALLY last minute prints.
The Evil Afikomen Project (actual Glowforge use):
This is going to take a bit more background. For those who are not jewish, the passover seder is the retelling of the exodus from Egypt (in the book of Exodus… 
) in the Old Testament. Seder which is the Hebrew word for “order” (and the root of “b’seder” which Israelis use all the time for “it’s all good” or “OK” but literally means “it is all in order”) is because the retelling is in a prescribed order and manner. In general if you do the real seder (for those familiar with the Maxwell House Version, yes that Maxwell House, Haggadah (“the telling” - the written book of the service), which we do not use, is a long service (like 3-4 hours with dinner in the middle). During the service the actual exodus story only takes 15 minutes, the rest of the time is either historical anecdotes or explaining why certain things are included in the service like Horseradish.
One of the most obvious things as part of the service is explaining Matzah (which the explanation from the bible is BS, as if you actually take flour and water, mix it and throw it on a rock, you get a brick* [see bonus at end], not matzah, but historical license aside during the explanation we use 3 set-aside matzah pieces. One of those is called the Afikoman (which is basically the greek word for “The thing you eat after”). This is a critical item as during the service it represents the ancient sacrifice at the altar of the temple in Jerusalem (thank goodness, matzah crumbs are bad enough to sweep up!) so is the last thing we eat of the night. This matzah gets broken in half, and half is for my secret use later as the runner of the service. That Afikoman gets broken into pieces and hidden (I get up and wander during dinner “talking with people” as I casually lean against something and slide the matzah behind/on things around the rooms, and the kids have to search for it, and they ransom it back for prizes (typically little gifts/toys) and the service cannot resume before we get that all back. The problem you face is after 20 years of hosting in the same house (with the same “kids”, now all older than 23) is that A) hiding reasonably is impossible and B) the kids aren’t kids anymore so this loses a bit of fun.
Sooo, finally to the project. If you have a laser cutter, a UV printer and some matzah the answer is obvious: Fake Matzah. Yes, instead of all the obvious hiding spots (since we have to eat it once reassembled a lot of places are out of bounds) so instead how about filling the room with draft board fakes, so like the scene in The Thomas Crown Affair, we flood the room with fakes. So first step is getting a good scan of broken matzah, get a good cutout in Photoshop using the magnetic lasso tool, then take the outline and pump that as “Paths to Illustrator” and take the path as a SVG to the glowforge and cut out the piece of Draftboard, a quick layer of white spray paint (you don’t need it but spray paint is like 1% the cost of white resin):
I took the PNG I had made the SVG from, and put that in Eufymake Studio set the mode to a raised pattern.
OK didn’t quite get the alignment perfect, but given this is only quick and dirty around the room this is fine. The blue tape is because I knew I was going to get some overspray.
Need to turn off the gloss coat layer (didn’t even notice I had it on)
A classic hiding spot of Afikomen matzah but that is Draftboard!
*BONUS MATZAH INFORMATION
As mentioned above when you mix flour and water without leavening and either directly bake it or let it air dry you get a brick. How do I know this? Well way back when I worked at General Foods, the makers of Grape Nuts. Grape Nuts is a brick of baked Flour+Rye+water+salt. Once baked it is the shape and consistency of cement. It goes into a shredder which had tungsten carbide blades to smash it into the chunks we all love. No literally. I found this out when I was looking at sales reports and noticed Miller Brewing (which we also owned) bought hundreds of tons of Grape Nuts (in 55gal drums no less) and this perplexed me as to are they just huge John Denver fans (The Post Cereal spokesman, he was super nice in person) or did they have some mysterious use for it. Well it turns out to make a superb industrial abrasive for edible sandblasting material for the copper vats. The huge brewing vats require periodic sandblasting and they use Grape nuts since if any of the material isn’t removed, well those are pretty much the ingredients of beer anyway. So I don’t believe it was possible as described in the bible to make Matzah this way, but is a nice story.
Note a common misconception is that jews must eat matzah for the 8 days of passover, while true during the seder service itself, otherwise it’s kind of the only way to eat things you’d normally throw on bread, so while not mandatory, makes sandwiches less messy than throwing everything on your hand.
