Garden Stakes (Not Steaks!)

Free Laser Designs
1

Good Evening,

As a brand-spanking-new glowforge owner and graphic design wannabe, I’m working on learning how to use Inkscape by tackling some simple honey-do projects around the house. This one is some simple crop label stakes for my wife & mother in law.

If anyone is interested, I’d really appreciate some pointers on improving this design, mainly for speed. Currently, the project takes about 90 minutes to finish due to engraving the letters and the icons for each. After reading a few tips & tricks here, I used the Path->Trace bitmap function to allow all of my icons to engrave at the same time instead of one-by-one. That helped a lot, but I was thinking that it would be more practical to use the glowforge SCORE function on all of these instead of engrave. What do I need to do to convert these to paths?

Also, does the path->trace bitmap function convert rasters to vectors? I thought that was the case, but it looks like engrave is still my only option in the glowforge interface…but the only option is graphic engrave instead of photo engrave. I don’t think I’m understanding the distinction here. Is there a 3rd option, besides just raster and vector?

Thanks!
Download link - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1lq4jyRbFiloM_wQMd2YnybwE7PKE8Qzs
Garden_Stakes_v1

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42 Likes
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Those are great!

If you want to speed up an engrave, try laying the stakes horizontally, and do fewer in one pass. The vertical travel distance is the main culprit with long timing on the engraves. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Excellent. Thank you.

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Nice designs… did you sneak in a crop of Jimmy’s? (or is it just the fertilizer?)

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Nice share!

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That’s the stake for the potato mound. :wink:

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Very nice!!! Thank you.

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Those are really nice. Your humor should fit well here :grin:

:no_mouth:

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Thanks!

Is there an option in Inkscape to invert colors in an object? I think the Hoffa icon would engrave better with the colors inverted.

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In Inkscape, select the stake in question and ungroup, then you can manipulate the Hoffa fill and stroke.

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These are really nice! Thank you!

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If you have a vector, but it’s filled, the GFUI will still default to Engrave. In your art program if you turn off the fill, and turn on the stroke, it’ll default to a cut. In either case, click on that command on the bar on the left and then click on score to get the score option.

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So not really a 3rd, but the GFUI will treat it differently depending on the layout!

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