One of my daughters’ favorite dance teachers is due to have her first baby in about 3 weeks. My middle daughter decided to knit the new baby girl a jacket, and I was so blown away when I saw it that I insisted that the girls work with me to design the perfect accessory to hang it up.
The final result was cut and engraved from cherry plywood, which has to be my favorite of all the materials at this point. It doesn’t engrave with as much contrast as the maple but the face color is just stunning.
Pretty simple design all in all, but very satisfying to work together with my kids to design every single part of it from the arc of the curves to the font selection to the engraving darkness. The design combines the mother’s love of dance along with the parents’ religious devotion – the father to be is a minister. The response from their teacher when she saw the gifts made it even more special.
I love giving gifts and the laser feels like a super power that lets me be much more deliberate and thoughtful about it. The fact that we could do this on the spur of the moment in a couple of hours today is what makes the Glowforge magical.
Incidentally, I forgot to mention this but it was interesting. I was under time crunch to get this print completed after I hit a snag with a prototype and had to print a second iteration. I was able shave more than 5 minutes off the cut time by separating individual objects into their own steps to reduce unnecessary head movement.
The original steps looked like this:
Engrave shoes.
Engrave text.
Engrave cross.
Cut.
I updated that to something that looked like this:
Engrave left shoe.
Engrave Tali.
Engrave cross.
Engrave Reese.
Engrave right shoe.
Cut.
Removing all the downtime in that long movement makes a huge amount of difference.
plywood, which has to be my favorite of all the materials at this point. It doesn’t engrave with as much contrast as the maple but the face color is just stunning.
