I wanted to pop in and give a run down of my experience with my Glowforge so far!
My Glowforge was delivered with a little bit of damage to the box but the machine itsself was in very good condition. Once my husband got home and helped me move it into the studio I was up and printing in no time. The only set back I ran into during setup was getting the orange knobs unscrewed…they were very snug 
Once the Glowforge was ready to print I printed a founder ruler, the next project the setup ran through was trace and print I was curious as to how the trace function would work with lettering so I grabbed a brush marker (Pentel touch currently my favorite brush pen) and printed a plaque out of 
maple plywood.
I thought it handled the lettering pretty well but in the future would probably just scan lettering for better resolution.
After I was done with the standard cuts I realized in my two year wait I hadn’t actually prepared any files to cut 
… so I jumped on my iPad and put together a little lettered piece, literally five minutes later I was printing this on walnut hardwood
I was really happy with how the glowforge was able to handle the flourishes and thin upstrokes something I always had issues with on a makerspace laser cutter I had used in the past.
An hour later I had put together another design tested it on some draftboard and by the end of the night I had designed, prototyped, printed and assembled this
I considered it a very successful first day with my Glowforge!!
The next day I needed some fall themed social media content and wanted to do something a little different so I decided to try my hand at laser cutting some leaves!
The camera was unbelievable helpful with all the projects I have done but this project I don’t think I would have been able to do without the camera placement…and magnets
That day I also played around with WOOD! Paper I haven’t yet gotten the best settings for this but it’s a cool material and thought I would share this is the 17pt cherry with kraft paper backing
That was the first two days of cutting I think I will stop there for now as this is getting a little long! Over all I am so happy with the glowforge.
A couple things that I would love to see improved on at some point;
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The amount of time it takes to load designs, large files can take a few minutes I would love for this to speed up a bit
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Being able to see how long the print time will take before sending the cut to the machine.
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Not being able to rotate a file if there’s an embedded raster image ( I think this is why I’m having this issue but I could be wrong about this causing the rotating issue)
I totally agree lettering videos are meditative to watch!
good calligraphy and yours is exceptional by my standards!