Hi everybody! I hope everyone has had a great weekend; we here in the Mid Atlantic finally got the rain we have so desperately needed but Mother Nature shut us down for a while on Saturday. We were undaunted today though!

I loved the wooden calling cards so much that of course I wondered how else we could make them. The clear acrylic cards turned out really well after we had a misfire; we removed the masking on it and got a lot of ghosting and frosting that made for fuzzy lettering. The whole point of a card like this is legibility so we went back to masking and also resumed the thinner font. We ended up choosing a thicker font for the wood cards because, again, legibility is the point. The biggest lessons for me this weekend are about the importance of letter spacing and font design when working with very small lettering. Good things to keep front of mind. What was most fun though was delving into colored acrylic and our first foray into leather! Here are done stills.

I have translucent colored acrylic on order and am excited to see how that works. The engraving in the opaque is hard to see. The is a purveyor of laser materials in North Carolina who manufactures acrylic that’s kind of like an Oreo. You have the color of your choice of acrylic as the “outer cookie” and the color of your choice for the “center filling” so when you engrave it, the core color is there and your outer cookie surrounds it. It’s spendy but it’s a really nice product.

These are a bit more fragile than the second run where Cameron thickened the lines.

So the possibilities are endless and I’m having a ball with it. Cameron is a little bewildered by how easily excited I am about these things but it’s just so much fun! I probably need to get out more but even if I did I still think I’d be just as excitable!

Here is a video of the leather cutting and engraving. The leather was so badly scorched by the laser, even at lower settings, I didn’t think it would clean up so easily. I’m going to dye it!

So that was all the time we had for fun. Given all of the lightening I couldn’t grill chicken breasts for salads so I ended up making this soup and it was delicious! Time consuming but delicious!

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Apparently I’ve flubbed the transfer of this link by accidentally uploading it as a separate post. Sigh. I have so much to learn!

Anyway, if you’re still with me, I’d love to hear your ideas about how you’d use cards like the ones we made this weekend. I saw someone using them as coupons for their business and someone else using them for seating arrangements at a wedding. How would you use them, or would you not have use for them?

As always, thanks for looking in on us. More fun to come!