Cat mandala

Made on a Glowforge
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A last minute birthday present for my mom. I saw an awesome cat butt mandala picture posted somewhere and thought, “I need that for my mom’s birthday!” Unfortunately for me, when I found the original source, it was an artist selling the actual completed mandala, not a purchasable file. And I had a day to do something, so little chance I could design, cut, and build.

So yesterday I found a non-butt cat mandala that I knew my mom would still like on Etsy and purchased it. Cut it early afternoon and stained it. Glued up on the evening and left it clamped overnight, then wrapped it this morning to gift today.

Unstained and stacked to preview on the first, stained and glued second. made with 10 layers of 5/32 columbia forest birch from home depot. 14.825" tall by 6.5" wide (just small enough to fit 2 up on a 12x20 board).

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Lovely. I like the colors you chose.

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Every bit as nice as the butt! :smile:

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I like that a LOT better than the butt. :slight_smile:

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maybe it’s more appropriate for my mom w/o the cat butt jewel. but it would feel more like a gift i would give if it had cat butt.

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Classy cat!

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the different stains lonk great!

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Lovely. Beautiful.

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Whoa. That is a showstopper. Beautiful work, and although I like the idea of the cat-ass-trophy, this is much classier. :grin:

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I love this!

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Guess you stained post-cut?

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yes, post cut. i did this by the seat of my pants. i hadn’t even made decisions about whether to stain or use thinned out colored acrylic paint when i started cutting. i decided to test with the scraps from the insides of the cuts since i hadn’t used this wood before and didn’t know how anything would take. and instead of testing on a full sheet, i waited to play w/scraps.

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Smart, turned out nicely. Did you plan the colors out digitally or just go for it physically?

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What a lovely piece! I love all the curves and colors. Glad you found another cat to cut. I am certain if you could have gotten the cat butt file, your cut would have been beautiful.

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That looks great!

Are you allowed to share the etsy here for the file? This is one of those layered pieces I might be willing to spend the materials on. (Though I’d likely manipulate it to only 5 layers.)

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Sure.

There are a bunch of great animal mandalas there. I had to scale this one down. It was originally 20+ inches tall. So some scaling to fit on GF and the a little bit smaller so I could do the pieces 2-up on one sheet (5 total sheets).

It was on sale for $20 over the weekend, looks like the sale on their Etsy ended.

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Even in the worst of times this is not a phrase I ever expected to see.

The end result is lovely.

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This looks amazing! I’m sure your mom loved it. What type/color stains did you use? I love the combination.

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don’t remember which type of stains, they were old wood stains from home depot that i had cans of in the shed. one can had separated badly enough i threw it away before testing. :slight_smile:

colors are:

Light: unstained (just the plain birch)
Medium: red mahogany
Dark: dark walnut

1 Like