So the other night, we put the kids to bed and I looked at my wife and said, “So, is there anything you wanna make on the Glowforge?” Stares at me blankly. “Nothing you want?.. Something you wanna give to somebody?.. Anything?.. Nothing?” She thinks for a moment and just kind of replies, “Well, I don’t know… I was kind of thinking about something that I could do for bracelets.” She then showed me some things she’d bought from the craft store that just needed some sort of charm to go on it.
So I hop online and just do an image search for bracelets and find a bunch of random stuff. After looking at everything, I said, “We could just make something simple, like a rectangular shape, holes in both sides for the actual bracelet and just put a word or phrase in the middle of it.” She agreed, so I jumped into illustrator and quickly threw together a template, and copied it a few times. The hardest part was coming up with words or phrases for the particular people she had in mind to get these.
Sidenote: I was surprised to find that even though I had the cuts and engraves on separate layers, the Glowforge UI figured out that the text engrave on one layer went with the rounded-rectangular cut on another. I could click & drag each piece separately and the block would stay with the text for each one!
In a matter of moments, they were cut and they looked sweet! Until we went to retrieve them and realized the didn’t cut all the way through the proofgrade material! What?! That’s not supposed to happen.
I pulled out the material and find that he wood is completely warped. Apparently, all the jobs from this past weekend being set to cut just right to waste the least amount of wood had caused it to warp pretty badly. Not something I was anticipating. So we set it up again in a different spot and that seemed to do better (though still not perfect), and she went to work.
Once again, I was simply thrilled to see someone in my household come-up with a random idea, and in a matter of minutes, turn it into a real thing. She couldn’t wait to give these things out to the people she had envisioned them for.