My 3 year old daughter lost most of the pieces to a cardboard memory game she had. She still tries to play with it, searching for the 1 or 2 matches that remain. Decided this would be a quick and easy project for the glowforge. Design is available on my website as always. The design has a few differences from the pictures as described on the website and below.
The pictures only show half the set. I decided to go ahead and take pictures while the second set was cutting. The cut time for the file was 2 hours 25 minutes. Since I had to cut it twice it took a total of about 5 hours.
Art work came from the artist Nuno Lezon on the noun project. Link provided on my site. Sorry for not linking here. I’m being lazy and I got a noun project pro account, which is a great deal if you use the website a lot and removes obligation to attribute for lazy folks like me.
The squares are 90mm squares with 10mm rounded corners. The rubber band cutouts are 9mmx3mm. The artwork is sized to a 60mm height. Cards are placed adjacent to each other with overlapping edges that have been deduplicated for the laser. Note: this does result in some burn marks on the sides of the pieces where some additional soot is deposited around the curved corners. This is visible in the stack picture. It doesn’t bother me as I’ve never found sideburns that distasteful. cymbal crash
After taking the pictures and playing with the cards a bit, I decided on some design changes to improve the usage of it. I made 2 changes not pictured, but included in the design files. In the pictures rubber band cutouts are removed from the sides. I added cutouts to the top and bottom as well so that you no longer have to orient the pieces when stacking them during clean up time. Also, the corners on the cutouts were a bit sharp. I rounded the exposed corners to a 1.5mm radius. Please note: due to the material cost of this project and its purpose, I didn’t feel it worth the cost to cut another duplicate copy with the changes made. That said, the file I’m providing has never actually been completely tested. I’d be very grateful if you would post your results here if you choose to make a set for yourself and let me know if there are any issues. I also just want to see what different designs people make 
This design works best on medium plywood so the card stack isn’t too tall once assembled. At $32 material cost and 5 hours of laser time, its not a very cost effective product. But its a really nice set filled with whatever art work you want. At 3 years old, I went with some simple animals because my daughter loves animals. But I’m planning on making several different sets, especially as she continues her learning career. Some ideas I had for more difficult matching:
- Alphabet set with half letters and half objects which start with that letter. E.g. (S matches with Snake)
- Number set with numeric digits being matched to representations of those numbers. Different representations of the numbers could be used: Dots like on dominos, polygons with different number of sides, simple set of objects to count such as 3 apples - which could also be combined with the alphabet set to require matching 3 cards (The letter, object and number)
- Pictures of family members who live far away and who she hasn’t seen in over a year because of COVID.
The download includes both the set pictured and a template for adding your own art with 60mm guide squares. The idea is that if you don’t want to mess around in inkscape, upload the template file to the glowforge UI, set the green lines to ignore and then just use them to aid you in placing and sizing designs. Should be a decent work flow for premium users who have lots of art work in the UI they can add.
