Quilt Block Coaster

Got my Glowforge earlier this week, but wasn’t able to get friends over to help set it up until today. My first print was… the founder’s ruler, of course! This is the second print. Here’s the (mostly) finished product, a blackwork quilt block coaster made from the proofgrade draftboard that came with my Glowforge. (The block’s Windblown Square in case any quilters are wondering…)

It still needs a few coats of some kind of water-proofing coating, but wow the scoring looks amazing. I don’t mean that tooting my own horn. I’m talking about the Glowforge! One reason I printed this was because I already made a set of these coasters at a local makerspace a bit over a year ago and I want to see how it turns out on the Glowforge. Here’s a comparison photo of the old one and the one made on the GF (with tape off the top half):

You can see that even with the tape on the GF made one looks so much better. The old one does have a couple coatings of polyurethane on it and a year+ of wear and it definitely dulled the color, but it’s clear that the scoring was not nearly as even or straight as the Glowforged one. Is Glowforge a verb? Anyway, it’s the exact same file, and the setup time was pretty much less than a minute on the GF.

I am seeing the limitations of the beta GF software, yes, but I’m definitely very impressed with the thing in general. There were four of us just standing around mesmerized as the laser did its thing going “wow it’s so pretty”…

Bonus picture: this was originally an embroidery pattern and of course I would make all my embroidery patterns .svgs ready to be fed into a laser cutter. Here’s what it looks like in needle and thread.

And now, to search the forum to see what waterproofing techniques are best at maintaining the deep, beautiful scoring…

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Awesome! Also interesting to see that the Glowforge is much better at not overburning in the corners compared to the other laser.

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Wow–that difference is just incredible!

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Ah so that’s what caused the weird wobbly effect on the other laser!

Very sharp! Also, the threadwork is lovely!

Thanks for posting. Quilting designs are a great resource. Nice work.

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Such an interesting pattern! Can’t wait to see how else you use your Glowforge for quiltinh.