I cleaned up the rolling pin today and learned some things. Vacuum your wood engravings; it will save some elbow grease. Two, food safe oils and a small brush go a long way to dissolve the soot left behind. Three, Pillsbury cookie doughs do not work with embossing rolling pins. I was so anxious to try her out that I asked Cameron to pick up some store bought cookie dough given that it would be well chilled. I can’t remember the last time I bought commercial dough of any kind; I’m a from scratch kind of girl. It turns out there is good reason that specific recipes are indicated for embossed cookies. Plus, they aren’t the tastiest sugar cookies either. Having said all of that, they weren’t a total failure either. You can see the embossing; I think I can get a cleaner rendering with a proper, from scratch recipe and very cold dough that holds its temperature better. I plan to chill my dough in pre-rolled/flattened disks when I get to making them and will be sure to post them here. The big surprise though was that the dough didn’t lodge itself into the crevices of the rolling pin. That surprised me. The clean up was fast and easy.

We continued our adventure with a wildly successful laser marked stainless steel thermal/insulated commuter cup. Oh my gosh it came out so well! The Omtech spray is very effective and reputedly forms a permanent bond with the metal. I have soooo many ideas! Best of all the Omtech spray washes off very easily.

We also did some experimenting with engraving glass tile from the back side. I posted the videos on YouTube; this post is getting really long so the short of it is that the results were poor. The tiles were thick which produced shadowing that made the images hard to discern. In addition, we quickly found that the differences in how tiles are fabricated make it impossible to generalize settings for this approach. There are also different types of glass that are fabricated with different ingredients and coatings that ultimately require testing settings for each project before doing a full run. You can certainly backlight some of the tiles for an interesting twist but engraving glass tiles from the back isn’t something I want to pursue further based on today’s outcomes. Engraving them from the front side is fine and fairly predictable. I don’t think there would be much call for it anyway. I have to sate my curiosity before I’m ready to eliminate options ????. Hop on over to YouTube if you’re interested in seeing what we did.

That’s our fun for today; more tomorrow!