Oh I love the mirror acrylic inlay idea! 
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Really nice outcome!
I love that! Not because of the hassle it caused you, of course. But that it’s true! It makes meticulous planning necessary, I suppose, for such designs, but it seems like in the end, you get exactly what you ask for.
Well done!
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Is kerf adjusting a technique, or a Glowforge feature, or a feature of some other software design package? Guess I have some reading to do!
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currently kerf is being manually addressed via padding in the vector software that you add. but yes precision in the kerf is part of the original feature advertisement and we are still waiting to see it
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Yeah, currently it’s something that I’m doing in the design itself. (I’m cutting non-Proofgrade materials).
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kerfgate if you want a long read
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I don’t know how they look in real life, but they look pretty amazing in the photos! You are a patient, patient hedgehog, madam. There were lots of people excited about inlay a while ago – hopefully they see this!
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Thanks…I was seriously thinking it was not the best idea at about four hours into it… ROFL!
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They’re stunning, and knowing that makes it much more special, more handmade in some ways.
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I always love going through the process with you and sharing your joys and frustrations…
Thank you for taking us on your journey with your explainations:smiley:
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Is it black acrylic for the base and box? Can you give us a few shots of the perforated mirrored acrylic that held the matrix for the jewels? Just trying to picture how you did this. Slap my hands if I’m asking too much. This is really beautiful!
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Yeah this one was definitely a textbook case of me biting off more than I could chew comfortably! (Figured I’d be a warning rather than a shining example.)
Yeah, give me a second…I’ll take a quick pic. 
Here they are…as you can see, I’ve got quite a few leftovers for whatever I decide to bling up next in that particular pattern. (hint…nothing - I’m not that crazy.)
And yes, it’s black acrylic for the box and frame of the tray. It wasn’t an actual inlay, because the mirrored acrylic was thinner than the black by a mm or so.
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Oh…shiney!!! Love this…alot!!!
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Thanks so much. Now I understand. I have some mirrored acrylic from laserbits but have to figure out which sheets they are. Need some sorting out and marking. Some of the masking on materials I bought has no marking on it and I have to peel back some of it to figure out what I have. So many sheets.
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Ah, so you really don’t need to adjust for kerf if you are going to glue things together?
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It looks like you could have made four of those trays with the material you used, by using each of these as your base and just swapping the colours between them.
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Very nice effect.
It looks like a regular matrix, so why do the tiles only fit specific places? Did you hand place the lines in the design so it is actually minutely irregular? If so it looks like a job for OpenSCAD as that would generate it programmatically, so they would be all exactly the same.
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Maybe you could add some kind of filler on those plates to do… another project 
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Did you have to peel off the protective paper on each tiny bit, or did you remove it before cutting?
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Yes if you are going to glue it, kerf adjusting is not necessary. (The kerf adjusting part took very little time though - even on the individual tiles, because you just do them all at once.)
Yes, I could have, except I was pretty much using up all of the available mirrored scrap - there wasn’t room to get a tray frame on them. (The tiles are already tiny.) I can still use those tiles - all I have to do is cut a couple more background frames. (I need to get some more black acrylic in here - I’m out. Just had the one sheet.)
Yes, it’s hand drawn in Illustrator, and the tiles and frame are rounded to take the pressure off of the acrylic corners and keep it from splitting. OpenSCAD would create perfect little rhomboids, and they would be interchangeable anywhere. (These are not technically rhomboids anymore after the corner rounding.)
OpenSCAD would be a lot easier, but it would also wind up looking a lot more mechanical, and I was shooting for the hand-made touch for this one.
Yep, they would work very well in a mosaic, with something like plaster, and I might do that with them one day - for something like that I wouldn’t necessarily have to have them fit precisely and I could just get them “close enough for government work”. 
Uhm, yes, and I forgot to mention that part. 
Horribly time consuming. I had the tiles masked on both sides to keep from damaging the backing that makes it mirrored.
One benefit to finally figuring out that duct tape would pick up all the bits at the same time, was realizing that it would also get the masking off when I picked the correct bit off of the tape. So for the last set (the green) I only had to deal with the specific tiles I was using, and I could pick off all the rest of the bits later.
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