Friends of mine got married just shortly after they moved to Washington State, and I wanted to gift them something to highlight both their new life together, and their new location.
I found @bwente’s monogram template on Cuttle and from there went down a rabbit hole to come up with this:
The pines on the two sides are Western Hemlock (Washington’s State Tree), the cones are made of 
walnut ply, and the leaves of poplar that was painted with a very watered down mix of green and yellow alcohol inks.
The flower in the middle is Washington’s State Flower, the Coast Rhododendron (Rhododendron macrophyllum) with cherry ply leaves and purpleheart flowers.
The letter itself is walnut ply.
Probably way too much construction detail:
First I found the art - I literally had a day and a half to do this, so I started with drawings found online. The Western Hemlock was simple. The Coast Rhododendron prooved to be more difficult. I found a guideline image I loved, and then a line drawing I could mess with to recreate the bundle of flowers. I spent far too long trying to find a line drawing of the leaves, and in the end manually traced the veins.
Once I had my design I started cutting with cardboard. I ran a few different versions until I ended here:
BTW, the best advice if you’re doing layered work is to score the outline onto the base piece - it makes gluing SO much easier. I also had to rough up the area I was going to glue because the PG is already finished and even the best wood glue (I use Titebond) won’t actually bond without something to grab onto. If I’d be thinking I’d have had the laser cut a quick grid pattern, but I didn’t so I used my xacto
I still needed to thicken up the letters spelling their name, and clean up the center of the flower as the trace had made a mess! I used the new Inkscape plugin to figure out exactly what I had to clean up, it helped SO much! That being done I didn’t need to do another in cardboard, I moved onto wood.
(the cones still have masking paper on them here)
Ok, I was quite happy with this and my plan was just just glue it all together and do a clear finish, but I realized the poplar, while it stood out from the walnut, just didn’t have enough punch - so I started mixing alcohol inks. Lucky I had spare material so I could run test spots until I found one that made me happy
and a closeup of the flower:
which is done in layers:
and the year:
Happy with how close the cardboard version was:
and then I used the Premium outline feature to make myself a protective sleeve:
I sandwiched that between a couple of uncut sheets, and layered it into the bottom of my suitcase - it made it to the West coast with narry a ding
If they ever send me a pic of it hanging, I’ll add that
