I love to play with materials on my makerspace’s laser, but I rarely get surprised. I have this black coverstock from Michaels and I’m doing a really cool project I’ll be sharing soon, but when I was cutting it I saw brown edges… I knew it was going to get fun. So, dropped an engrave on it and low and behold a beautiful tan logo. As Forest’s mama always said…
That’s cool! I may have to do some shopping tomorrow!
It’s their regular brand 110lb black cardstock 
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Are the edges frayed at all? They look pretty clean in the photo.
Oh no… only reason it has a bump on top is that I didn’t have the power up enough on the vector cut at speed… it will cut shapes clean at that setting, but it goes a little TOO fast in a straight line. lol
Outstanding! That looks really great. Have to go get some now.
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Always use the 40% off coupon at Michaels. If you dont have one, grab one online
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I am the coupon queen. It’s bad. Lol i think they are also now accepting more than one per visit… Help us all
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Sorry, I meant the edges of the engraved areas.
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I’m comping up a layered ring design… It’s truly amazing how tiny you can get with a laser… Black coverstock holds up as well as the others
it’s grass, so frayed was the look I was shooting for lol
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And when you buy …at least at one I go to…they give you another coupon good for the following week. So you can patiently stock up on materials
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Gorgeous!
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Many of the dark colors bleach when lasered…as the light colors darken a bit…
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Right, but you would assume when the light gets darker from the burn that the dark would too. Most people would anyway… seems logical. I have done a ton of dark including other blacks but none did that, so whatever pigment they used in that was a nice surprise.
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Is this a weird lasering quirk, like how the fabric sort of bleached in another post? Or is this because of the core color of the cardstock?
If it’s the latter, you can buy cardstock with black core, white core, solid core, etc. You could make some really cool effects.
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Hey cool find! Thanks for the share!
Laser all the things!
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Yes, this is more of the bleaching I believe…the exact same normal weight black stock didn’t do it so I wasn’t expecting it. Someone up at the space had done an example on the blue with a white core and it did look really cool. I will have to look into it too! I have thought about just doing a thin layer of acrylic paint or water color and lasering it and seeing how it looks too 
I can’t get up there as often as I want and when I am there I just want to experiment. lol
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Yep, the bleaching is definitely a thing. Happens on construction paper and origami paper too at low power levels (says the guy who played a lot with diode lasers). In my experience it’s very much dependent on the particular coloring agent – some lightish colors will also bleach. And very dependent on how much absorption you’ve got at the wavelength of your laser (obvious for visible light lasers, maybe not so much for IR).
That will be really cool to experiment with, especially when low power is dialed in. Might have to make a huge matrix of color vs power/speed vs paper type vs manufacturer…
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I’m dying–that ring is beyond fabulous. I love everything about it–concept, execution, and style. Please, please, post the finished version when you’re done.
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