Oh yikes! 
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I know!
I’m the worst at my own advice, I often craft while barefoot in my home 'cause who wears shoes at home, right?
A retractable X-acto might be a better idea, then you only need to worry about butterfingers.
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For this I need a stiff blade (everyone restrain yourselves) but I’ll look into getting one for other projects - sounds like a nice feature. 
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Oh and you were all over me about nailing my finger with the pneumatic nail gun! At least that did not bleed badly. Every time I have cut myself with an exacto it has looked like a crime scene! Be careful girl!
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The following story isn’t really for the squeamish. If you are, probably just stop reading here and know it’s gross and carry on with your day. For the rest of you:
I knew a kid growing up who wasn’t clumsy he was just an idiot. Everyone said he was accident prone. He wasn’t. He was just prone to doing stupid things. So one day we were working after school building balsa airplanes and he is trying to shave a little mass off so he starts using an exacto to whittle off pieces of these quite thin balsa sticks. And you guessed it he slipped and hit his finger. Problem was he hit the joint in his pointer finger. Cut clean through everything except the skin on the other side. All the tendons and nerves and good stuff? Severed cleanly. And thats the story about why I don’t use exacto knives anymore. He had hthe finger sewn back on and after years of PT I believe regained 40% of the use of the finger back
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I’m glad I do my stupid in small doses.
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I’ll try. I promise. 
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And pants… Wear pants… or at least something that goes under the table edge…
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Many (many) years ago, I worked at a publishing company that still did page layouts on cardboard flats, so we had a lot of x-acto knives just laying around.
We used them to play darts on a bulletin board.
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I’d be lying if I said I’ve never super glued the blades together to make throwing stars 
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Shhhhhh… don’t let that idea get out too far. Kids these days are happy with fidget spinners, and if they manage to choke on those, they can’t handle X-acto blades. 
oooh… spinning fidget blades…
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Spinning fidget blades = return of natural selection? Hahaha
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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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