Happy Friday everybody! I hope your workday is winding down and your weekend launch sequence has been activated!

I’ve gotten a few questions regarding the silicone engraving that helped me realize that I wasn’t doing a very good job of explaining how the designs get to the laser to people who haven’t worked with design software and/or who haven purchased vector art in the past. Here goes!

The jig made of doubled corrugated cardboard holds the silicone in place. The compressor is blowing a strong, continuous blast of air that would displace the watch bands were it not for the jig. We will cut a jig out of a single layer of corrugated cardboard next time because the doubled up stuff is too tall but ended up being serviceable. You may not have noticed but when the fabrics were cut there were magnets holding it flat to the steel honeycomb. You probably did notice the fabric fish scales being blown around after they were cut. The heavier the medium the less the need to anchor it becomes.

As for the designs like the sewing machine mandala cut from wood and the sunflower pattern engraved in the silicone, those designs were created by artists who draw vector files (often called SVG’s) designed specifically for laser cutting and engraving but can also be used on craft cutters like the Cricut or the Silhouette Cameo machines. Those of you who craft or do machine embroidery are very familiar with buying digitized designs from various artists.

The design file, if it’s a vector file, can be sized without risking distortion. This differs from an embroidery design file in that vector files can be shrunken to a few inches or expanded to a few feet without distortion where as embroidery files, as an example, have a much smaller range of dimensions they can be resized to before they are too distorted to stitch out.

So, the designs I purchased on Etsy were downloaded to a laptop and then exported into the LightBurn software that runs the laser. You can do many things to edit the file you buy to not only fit your space you’re engraving or cutting, but you can merge other designs with them to personalize them. You can take a photo of your dog or cat and edit out the background, convert it to a black and white photo, export it to LightBurn and engrave it on acrylic or wood or slate or a flat-ish rock in your back yard. You can write something in your own hand writing, take a photo, export that photo to LightBurn, scale it to fit your space, and engrave it. Those are just some examples. Whether it’s something you create from scratch in design software, a vector file you buy, or a digital photo of what ever you want, it can be edited to suit your project in LightBurn and transmitted to the laser.

Going forward I’m going to strive to insert links within my posts that you can click on if you want a more in depth understanding of how a particular process works and ignore it if you don’t. I truly appreciate those of you who have reached out with questions and hope you’ll keep doing that when you come across something that isn’t clear to you because you’re helping me improve!