This is after the fact but for what it’s worth, I have found that the most efficient and painless way to remove something like a splinter or a thorn you can feel but can’t visualize, is applying a piece of packing tape (extremely sticky) and pulling the tape off opposite the direction you suspect the thorn or splinter went in. Work great!
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Sounds like it beats my method, which is digging it out with the first needle I can find. 
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Now see, is that a guy thing? Something like that would never occur to me. 
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Must be. Everything is a weapon in the making. I don’t have kids but I’m already worried about ending up with more than one boy
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Here is how I would do the trees to allow for maximum control on the engrave of each tree and allow for continued scalability of the design. The GFUI still does not allow variable gradients on fills so you would need to assign different colored fills to the closed vector paths of the trees.
I would do a boolean difference of the foreground and background trees. Since the GFUI doesn’t allow for clipping or masking. That will be fairly tedious but in the end will give you the most flexibility. At least, that’s how I like to do things. Embedding a bitmap into a vector doesn’t always produce the results I want and then adding the bitmap later in the GFUI over an existing SVG then doesn’t save it and you have to bring it in an position it again.
However, given the number of different shades you have in this cool drawing, that might be a non-starter because it would take some doing. Looks about ten different shades altogether. Doable, but challenging.
Might be best to keep the SVG for further editing and just export the PNG of the whole image as you need it for engraving.
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While I think having boys would be an absolute blast (hey, we never really grow up) the idea does frighten me, knowing what me and my buddies got into… and nowadays that information is so readily available on the internet, you don’t even need money to buy a copy of “Backyard Ballistics” anymore. The Implements of Irritation can be much more sophisticated too with all the electronics/arduino kits and custom phone apps.
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I wear a full body Kevlar suit when using exacto knives. Just kidding, I hack off large chunks of myself on a regular basis. Haven’t hacked off more than I can regrow yet!
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Yeah, that one stung! 
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Whew. Thank goodness you can click outside the picture to re-blur it.
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That reminds me…
Never wear gloves while using power tools where your hands may get close to the work. A guy at my previous employer had two fingers ripped off his hand by a magnetic base drill press that had snagged his glove while he was clearing chips away from the piece. Of course he shouldnt have used his hand for that in the first place but had he not been wearing heavy work gloves, the bit would have only taken a chunk of skin, not complete fingers. After the ordeal and when he came back to work, the guys in the shop added insult to injury and nicknamed him Jonny Ocho.
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Yup, the rule is that if it spins no gloves. The damage will be less.
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My son laughs when I claim that we should issue Lawn Darts to every kindergarten class to weed out the dumb ones early. Ha!
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Jarts! What a profound miscarriage of justice and violation of natural selection.
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I once stabbed myself pretty deeply with an exacto knife. Not fun!
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Exacto is a brand that makes lots of knives. What do you, specifically, mean by “exacto knife”?
Simple silver handle with a No.11 blade, or something else?
I have found that I prefer Excel, OLFA, NT Cutter, and Yellotools knives over Exacto, and I prefer retractable breakaway blades over fixed blades. Most people keep blades in the knife for far too long after they have gone dull, and the breakaway blades makes it a lot easier to stay on point with that, not to mention that the flatter profile doesn’t roll away from you (or off the table into your foot! eeps!)
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No visible blood, that’s a good thing 
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Indeed, exacto has a broad product line but yeah most mean one of the smaller ones with a spear point,usually a #11
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I guess I never realized how many kinds of break off blades they make. Noted, something to add to the workshop once it’s finished
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