With guests coming for Christmas Eve and my best laser project packaged and sent as a gift, I wanted to make something quick but interesting to add to the festive mood.
After viewing and discarding 1,000,000 shutterstock patterns and ad-bait fake sites I found some neat SVG renderings of some Islamic patterns. I love these because of their complexity and symmetry. One day i’ll try to make a generator but for now I’ll use these pre-made ones. Thanks Lazur at OpenClipart.org
I had planned to have a lot of holes in the coaster, but nixed that because 1) I didn’t want to deal with floating letters falling out, and 2) it’s a coaster, so leaking fluids might be a design fail.
Instead I took a second pattern from the same guy to use as a background.
I used Sketch App, a Mac SVG editor that I had lying around, and was delighted by the internal design of Lazur’s SVGs–simple paths combined using booleans – that meant they were easy to manipulate, allowing me to tweak the path widths to my taste, and combine with the text to create clear boundaries.
Until I learn how to script sketch.app, adding each person’s name is a somewhat manual process, but not without it’s own pleasure.
I selected Medium Maple Ply and cut them about 4". The first couple were run at proof grade standard engrave and standard score, but this took like 25 minutes each, so I ramped down to the slightly less satisfactory draft and knocked the rest out before dinner.
A boring weed over aperitifs and a final wipe with cutting board oil for some red wine resistance finished them off.
Guests got to take theirs away as party favours, and we had a nice chat about the process.
