MSRaynsford

Slate is one of the materials that I knew could be laser engraved but I just never got round to doing it (I've had some slate coasters for years but we have a functional old table and don't use coasters). So when I was asked to do a house sign I jumped at the chance. It's a simple design but it came up lovely. I even marked where the holes should drilled (but decided not to drill it myself). The best thing is that I was sent 2 pieces of slate in case of accident and I got it right first time so now I have my own piece to play with (or leave on the shelf for years with the coasters).

I wanted to up my game and make some really fancy tree decorations this year. Laser cutting is very popular this year but a lot of the designs you can buy are just cut straight onto laser ply. I opted for real woods this year, 3mm thick, Spruce, Bass and Mahogany. I test these in ply and then cut them in wood and realised that the best way to make them stand out would be multiple woods in each design.  With 3 base colours I could also mix and match a few designs.   ( svg here ) As you'll have noticed the blog is a bit slower than it used to be while I work upon the vanillabox  but there will be good things coming in the new year, so until then merry Christmas and a happy new year. 

I recently saw someone using the Amaziograph app for the iPad, it allows you to create drawings with rotational symmetry and people were making really fancy doily shapes by swiping their finger across the screen. I knew it would lend itself well to line art but as I investigated these apps I discovered they were all raster based and wouldn't easily give vector artwork that could be cut so I had to find another way.  It's fairly straight forward to replicate in Inkscape. Inkscape allows you to clone an object and the clones all update when the original changes. I drew a simple line and then cloned it dozens of times, arranging them all with rotational symmetry. As I modified the base line, all the other lines updated and these interesting patterns grew in complexity. The drawing was already vectored so it was easy to get it across to the laser. The whole pattern was cut in a single laser line so I filmed the process too. ( svg here )