This is the most recent wedding papercut that I’ve created.
I did originally create a design that just used the initial letters of the two people, but the trouble with couples who have the initials of “N” and “O” is that it looks like the artwork is spelling out “NO”. Which isn’t a very auspicious message for a wedding gift. So I decided to spell out their names in full, after all.
First I tried cutting the piece with my lasercutter, but the result wasn’t as good as I’d hoped for. The laser-cut edges of the designs were just a bit too brown and toasted. So I cut the design by hand instead, to ensure that the edges of the paper stayed their original colour. Then I framed the piece in a “shadow box” frame. (It’s taken me years of experimenting and searching, to finally find the right type of frame for this type of papercut. Would you like a tutorial article on how to frame papercuts like this? If so, please let me know via the comments section or the Contact page. )
Creating the design
The leafy/berry-y elements of the wedding papercut design came from an SVG file that I bought from Vectorstock.com. I’ve mentioned Vectorstock here before, but basically the idea is that to save time, you don’t want always to draw a completely new design from scratch – especially if someone else has already created a lovely design to begin with. Buying an expanded licence allows other artists to buy the SVG file and then sell their own artworks, based on that design. With this system the original artist gets a payment from other artists who want to use their design, the customer-artist gets to save time when creating their own artworks, and the customer-artist’s own customer gets an artwork that is totally unique but is usually a lower price than if the papercutting artist designed every single element of the design from scratch . Win/win/win!
Last month I wrote this article about experimenting with Amazon’s FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) programme – where the basic idea is that sellers ship a load of products to an Amazon warehouse, then Amazon do the picking, packing and postage for them. I’ll try to remember to do a more detailed report when the dust has settled and the Christmas rush is over, but for now let’s just say that the experiment appears to have been successful. In fact it’s been so successful that I have scored a “Christmas number one” this week, and here is my screengrab to prove it:
As shown in the screenshot, my personalised Christmas letter bauble is now officially an Amazon Best Seller.
When is a #1 not a #1…?
OK, it’s a bestseller in a subcategory of a subcategory of a subcategory. But I’m still taking it as a win!
It was hard work, though. In order to get to that stage I’ve had to sell a lot of bauble ornaments. And in order to get to that stage I’ve had to make a lot of bauble ornaments. For six weeks in the run-up to Christmas it felt like my whole house was a mini factory full of baubles, wood sheets, ribbons, boxes, and wrapping materials. My family became my factory workers, and my cat became very confused.
The final batch of ornaments was only processed by Amazon yesterday (21 December), so maybe that’s too late for even Prime customers to order my products. But in the meantime I’m just going to bask in the glow of having achieved a Christmas #1 in the charts.
They keep selling out, so by the time you see this they might all be gone again. And in that case it won’t be worth looking at any of my shops. But for just this brief window in time, I’ve been able to achieve a bit of an ambition to be a chart-topper on Amazon.
As mentioned in a previous post, when we visited the lovely English town of Nantwich, we couldn’t find any fridge magnets there. And as I also said last week, I think fridge magnets are a superior form of souvenir. (They take up less space than commemorative mugs, for a start). So I had a look back through the photos from our visit, and invented…a Nantwich fridge magnet design:
Below is one of my photos from our visit. Nantwich has such picturesque houses that I hardly needed to make any changes to the image. For the magnet’s design I added a heart for extra cuteness, but that was more or less it!
I was so pleased with the end result that I tried the design as a souvenir keyring as well…
So if you’re visiting Nantwich and also happen to be a fridge magnet fan (and depending on whether they still have any in stock), you should hopefully now be able to find one at Nantwich Museum. In fact I like the design so much I’m going to put one on my own fridge 🙂
The museum itself had some really unusual local history features – e.g. how Cheshire cheese was (and is) made. Plus, of course, the story behind those iconic black-and-white buildings around the town.
What is a “sprue”, and why should I use sprues with my lasercutting designs?
(This is another article in “Money-Saving Lasercutting Tips” – a free tutorial series that demonstrates effective and efficient lasercutting techniques. Tip #3 is all about those awful moments when you watch your precision-cut laser pieces drop down into the guts of the machine … and how to avoid those moments in future.)
Definition of a sprue
Sprues are most commonly seen in injection-moulded plastic toys. For a fuller description check out the Wikipedia definition, but briefly:
In the image below, there are little links that connect the plastic toy components to the frame. These are the sprues. They are created as part of the moulding process, but the useful secondary function of sprues is that they hold the components securely in position within the plastic frame, until you twist or cut the components out. So below, the pieces stay safely in place until the user needs them, rather than rattling around in a box or falling on the floor and getting lost.
Why do I need to use sprues when I’m cutting with a laser?
In laser cutting projects, you often need to cut light materials such as paper or card. But because the machines often blow and/or suck air during the cutting process, it’s very easy for a lovely piece of personalised wedding card to just fly away while you look on in horror.
It’s also really common to need to cut very small pieces from plastic or wood. But if they are smaller than the holes in the cutting bed of the laser machine, the pieces often fall through the holes as they have been cut. Then you either have to fish the pieces out of the cutting bed, or cut them again. This can potentially be a big waste of time and money.
Oh no! Where have three of my little circles gone?
This will happen to all lasercutter users at least once, but not everyone knows what to do to avoid it.
It might seem like it doesn’t matter very much because they are only tiny pieces and you can always cut more of them. But in the example image above I have lost 75% of my pieces. And what started out as a cutting job of only a few seconds, has now turned into either a search-and-rescue mission to retrieve the three little circles, or a waste of more time and material because I need to cut more pieces.
So we therefore need a way to cut the pieces that automatically stops them falling down or blowing away.
One solution is to use sprues, and to include them in the cutting design right from the start.
When to Use Sprues
Generally speaking, use sprues if the piece to be cut is less than 1cm squared, and anytime you are cutting a design from a piece of paper.
How to Design Sprues
You can create sprues very quickly and easily in most vector-based drawing software (e.g. Photoshop or CorelDraw). I happen to use CorelDraw, but the principles are the same for most other apps/programs.
For most lasercutting projects, a sprue is just going to be a small break in the cutting line. It should be:
Big enough that the cut piece remains connected to the paper/wood/plastic
Small enough that the cut piece can be pulled or pushed out of the sheet of paper/wood/plastic by hand
There are two main ways to create them. The first is to ‘manually’ make a tiny break in the cutting line, and the second is to use the Weld function to make the break.
Method 1: Make a ‘manual’ break in the cutting line
Step 1) Make sure that you can edit curves and manipulate/add nodes on the cutting path of the design. (In CorelDraw the “Shape Tool” lets you do this.)
Note: If you can’t see any nodes to edit, you may need to convert the shape to curves first (e.g. by right-clicking the mouse and selecting “Convert to Curves”):
2) Zoom in really close to the object (e.g. so that a 3mm line fills the whole screen), then add two new nodes as close to an existing node as you can manage:
3): Select the middle node of the group of three nodes, then break the path of the curve. (e.g. by right-clicking and choosing “Break Apart”):
Screenshot from CorelDraw: breaking a curve
4) That middle node should have broken in two, so take one of the two resulting nodes and drag it about half a millimetre outside the curve. Then do the same for the other new node. This creates a small break in the cutting line, so that when you cut the piece it should now remain fixed in place until you’re ready to push or tear it from the material you were cutting.
Screenshot from CorelDraw with broken curve zoomed in
Screenshot of object with sprue at the top
5) Use the laser cutter to cut out the shape.
The object can now be pushed or pulled out of the sheet of material that it was cut from.
(You may need a knife or scissors to help cut it free, and a file or blade to cut off any extra material left over.)
Extra material at the top of the flower can be cut off with scissors
Conclusion
Using sprues helps laser cutters to save time, money, and annoyance. Instead of wailing in anguish as you watch another tiny precision-cut object fly away or disappear down a hole, consider using this little ‘design hack’ to avoid those problems.
Basically, whenever you’re lasercutting and you think “tiny” or “paper”, you should also think, “use sprues!”
I hope you found this article useful.
Method 2 (using the ‘Weld’ function to create sprues) is coming up later, but in the meantime if you have any comments or questions, please feel free to share them in the comments section or via the contact form.
Money-saving lasercutting tips #2: How to make “money for nothing” from scrap materials
(This is part of a series of money-saving tips for lasercutting businesses and enthusiasts.) The previous article discussed why you should use your leftover sheets of lasercutting material. This follow-up article delves a bit more deeply into how you can use these scrap pieces more economically, and potentially make ‘money for nothing’ by inserting bonus shapes between the main shapes that you are going to cut. It includes a link to a free lasercutting vector file that contains examples of these bonus shapes.
(If you don’t want to bother reading the article you can just click the button below. It should link straight to the free lasercutting file of sample ‘bonus’ shapes. (If the link is broken, please let me know, so I can fix it again.)
In the current ‘austerity’ economy there is always an interest in make-do-and-mend activities. At the moment even the BBC are running aprogramme calledMoney for Nothing. In this programme, dustbin-diving cheapskates thrifty people find old objects and then take them to artists and craftspeople who then convert the items into something beautiful and/or useful.*
The tips below follow that notion, and demonstrate how you can hopefully turn some of your scrap materials into cash.
Getting more value from your lasercutter
Artists and crafters are rarely well-paid, and so always try to get the most value out of materials as possible. This article shows how to avoid the feelings of frustration and guilt that can come with wasting materials … by using the leftover lasercutting materials to potentially gain some extra money. Win/win!
And as mentioned above, there is a free lasercutting vector file (PDF, SVG, or EPS) available. The file contains examples of extra items that can be inserted in between the main items you are cutting. That way you can use even very small sections of wood or acrylic to make useful products.
The idea is that your time is used more efficiently by cutting out (potentially) useful items straight away, rather than saving small weirdly-shaped bits of wood ‘just in case’.
And because you have used the scrap wood to cut out these (hopefully) useful items, your subconscious won’t give you a constant guilt-trip about wasting materials. So you can get on with doing other, more important lasercutting jobs instead.
Designing your own ‘bonus’ shapes
Below is a link to a free lasercutting vector file. It contains examples of popular shapes that can be used immediately. As mentioned in the previous article, I use this type of ‘bonus’/filler object all the time. When cutting family trees for example, these use large sections of wooden sheet – which then leave funny-shaped scrap pieces…
There’s plenty of space either side of the trunk to cut other objects!
…so rather than waste the leftover wood, I use my ready-made ‘bonus’ shapes to fill in the gaps. Shapes like numbers, letters, and hearts are always popular with other crafters, and so I might cut out a set of hearts and put them on Ebay or Etsy or Folksy. That way, the expensive lasercutting wood sheet material is then used to its full potential.
Have a think about items that you might be able to sell to other crafters, for example. Acrylic letters and numbers to use as card toppers? Little wooden hearts to use as table confetti or jewellery? Different sizes of circles that could be used by toymakers?
Conclusion
By having a file of pre-made popular designs, you can use your leftover wood/acrylic to potentially generate extra income. Instead of keeping weird little bits of wood ‘just in case’, you can make an immediate decision about what to do with the scrap wood, so that you produce far less waste and far more profit.
Challenge: think about small objects that might be useful to other crafters (or even to yourself) in future, and create a file of those shapes. Then the next time you do a cutting job that leaves gaps between the main objects, insert some of the ‘bonus’ shapes into those gaps and cut them out as you go along.
In the meantime, here is a link to a free file which contains examples of some of those bonus shapes:
Free lasercutting file
I hope you found this article useful. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to share them in the comments section or via the contact form.
*Fellow Guild of Makers member Bad Dog Designs has had several pieces featured on the “Money for Nothing” programme. Check out his amazing ‘nixie clocks‘, made from objects such as old radios and record players.
Laser cutting materials such as wood veneers or acrylic sheets are often really expensive. Here are some money-saving laser cutting tips that will help to get the most out of your materials, and should also save time as well as money…
(Note: some of my blog posts contain affiliate links. If you’d like to know more about these, please check out my “policies” page.)
Tip #1: Fill in the gaps!
The other day Kitronik kindly sent me some samples of wood and acrylic…
…so I decided to test the acrylic by making some pink sparkly unicorns (obvs).
I found the designs on Vectorstock.com then downloaded them and laid them out ready to cut:
BUT I didn’t cut them out immediately. I knew there was a way I could get even more value out of that one small square of acrylic.
When doing any cutting job that involves irregular shapes, there will always be spaces in between the objects. So once you’ve cut out the main objects, what do you do with the acrylic/wood/card/paper/etc. sheet that is left behind? There are three main options:
Option 1: Throw it away (or send it for recycling, if it’s the right type of material).
The main advantage is that you get a tidier workspace.
But my reaction to this option is:
Noooooooooo!
Because there is still enough of the remaining wood/acrylic/whatever to cut other objects from. So you could save yourself some money by using those scraps of material.
Option 2: Keep it (because you don’t want to waste material that you could still cut from).
In the example image above, there are quite a few gaps between the unicorns. So there is enough acrylic sheet left over that could be used to cut other small objects. Theoretically then, the advantage of this option is that you don’t have to cut the small items from a new sheet of acrylic – you can just use the gaps in the leftover piece of material instead.
This is what I used to do. Keep the leftover materials for later. But my answer to this now is also:
Noooooooooo!
No matter how organised you are, it is highly unlikely that you will ever go back and use those little spaces in the leftover wood or acrylic.
Because whatever shape you cut out next will need to fit onto a very weird shape of material. You might know that you want to cut out a circle that has a diameter of 20mm, but until you open the old cutting file for the previous job (e.g. sparkly pink acrylic unicorns), you’ll have no idea what the dimensions are of the leftover wood/acrylic from that previous job.
In the image below, the red circle does fit on the leftover sheet because it has a diameter of 20mm. But if it had a diameter of 30mm then it wouldn’t have fit:
…and the only way to find that out is to open the original cutting file (or find the piece of leftover material itself) and measure the gaps. This also assumes that you keep all of your cutting files, and that you can match them up to the exact piece of leftover material that is stored in some ‘leftover purgatory’ pile in your workshop somewhere like this:
scrap graveyard
So let’s just face it – it is almost certain that you will never use that piece of material again, once you’ve finished your initial cutting job. It’s always easier just to start from a fresh new piece of cutting material, because you know exactly how big that piece is, and you don’t have to worry about fitting your new piece around some oddly-shaped object that has already been cut out of the sheet.
It reminds me of when my husband was helping his mother to clear out her attic. He swore that he had found a box up there labelled “pieces of string too short to save”.
It may also be a false economy to hunt down the piece of scrap to cut the new object from. Finding the correct computer file and/or piece of physical scrap material might take several minutes, whereas cutting from a fresh sheet of material will be much quicker.
However, you may still hate waste (of both resources and time) and want to make the most of your material. In this case there is still a third option available. This is what I tend to do nowadays instead of the two options above:
Option 3: Fill in the gaps
This is a good compromise. It lets you cut your ‘main’ objects (unicorns, in this case), but also make something useful with the leftover material.
I suggest keeping a separate file of ‘gap-filling objects’, ready for you to copy and paste into your other projects. Heart shapes always come in handy for crafters. Letters and numbers are also very popular.
The screenshot below shows the solution in action.
First I inserted the outlines of the unicorns, and experimented with fitting as many of them onto the little square of material as I could.
Then I copied and pasted the letter “M” and some hearts into the document, to fill in the gaps.
Finally I inserted some tiny circles (bottom right-ish). The sparkly acrylic was a completely new material that I was testing, and so I needed to cut out a few small shapes first in order to find the correct speed and power settings for the laser cutter.
unicorn sampler with extra shapes for economy
As a result, from one little square of acrylic that was less than 10cm x 10cm, I managed to cut out:
3 sparkly pink unicorns
8 sparkly pink hearts
1 sparkly pink letter
The result was that (1) the new material was thoroughly tested, (2) I didn’t have to store a piece of nearly-useless acrylic sheet in my superShed, and (3) I ended up with a few bonus items that could possibly be sold or given away later, and (4) even if I ended up discarding the bonus shapes later on, I wouldn’t feel too guilty because they were basically cut from scrap material in the first place.
Additional tip:
Don’t spend too long worrying about what the ‘filler’ shapes should be. Remember that the point is to turn the laserable material into something more useful (or better still, more sell-able), than the material which would have just gone to waste otherwise.
Conclusion
This is a really fast and efficient way to get the most value out of your laser cutting materials. It solves the problems of waste and guilt, and saves time as well as money. If you are running (or considering running) a laser cutting business then it’s definitely worth trying this option.
I hope you found this article useful. If you do have any questions or comments (or more money-saving laser cutting tips) then please do get in touch.
Rob and I are on holiday in the UK at the moment, and I’m recharging my ‘creative batteries’ by going to lots of museums and lovely English towns and castles.
The other day we went to the town of Nantwich, and none of the shops or museums that we visited seemed to sell fridge magnets. There is surely a gap in the market for them, because I actually know quite a few people who collect fridge magnets.
Here are a couple of examples below of buildings that I think would look nice as fridge magnets:
Heck, you could even make your own mix-and-match village of cute little black and white buildings on your fridge or freezer if only you had a few of these buildings cut out as fridge magnets.
I am now on a mission to create some magnets for myself, to see if they come out as well as I imagine they will…
Laser cutters are so versatile that sometimes it’s really easy to get sidetracked, and think “I wonder if I could…” and then start on a whole new series of experiments. That’s how I ended up the other day wondering if I could create a birthday card with fairies on it. I’m not brilliant at drawing though, so I needed to try to find some royalty-free images that I could use as a basis for the designs, where I wouldn’t be infringing copyright and/or stealing someone else’s idea. At times like this, I usually turn to the brilliant Dover Books. They might just as well have “Royalty-Free Laser Cutting Resources” written all over them.
These books are absolutely great to use with art and design projects, including (of course) laser-cut and laser-etched projects. The books are specifically created for artists and craftspeople, to allow them to use the designs in their own projects. Once you have bought the book you may use the designs without having to pay royalties, and – more importantly – without breaking copyright laws.
As it says in the front of most of their books, “You may use them for graphics and crafts applications, free and without special permission, provided that you include no more than ten in the same publication or project…However, republication or reproduction of any illustration by any other graphic service, whether it be in a book, electronic, or in any other design resource is strictly prohibited.”
In other words, you can make artworks which include these images, but you can’t (e.g.) copy the images and sell them as stock images yourself.
The books used to just be in physical format, but in recent years they have included CD-ROMs with the artwork on them digitised as vector images and ready for you to incorporate in your own projects. (And now an increasing number of the books are available in eBook format.)
This week I’ve been developing William Morris-style laser cut birthday cards.
After a couple of days’ tinkering, I ended up with some really nice filigree designs of card toppers:
Birthday card design: E
Testing a gold “F” design
Where to find images and inspiration for your laser cutter
For the letters shown above, I bought the extended licence from Dreamstime, which is a website where you can buy royalty-free photos and vector-based illustrations.
Here are the art nouveau alphabet images that I used. Alternatively, you can enter your own search terms in the box below, to look for specific resources. For example, type “Art nouveau”, or “William Morris alphabet” in the box, and then click the ‘search’ button.
Another great resource that I’ve found for royalty-free designs is Vectorstock.com. They seem to have forgotten to use an apostrophe in the link/banner below, but they still do a brilliant range of illustrations. And because their files are all vector-based graphics, that means that they are usually very straightforward to cut with a laser cutter:
And at the moment (April 2018) both sites are even more useful if you have your own laser cutting business, because they can provide a little bit of extra income on top of your actual laser-cut products. You can either upload some of your own original designs and allow people to buy licences to use them, or can sign up as an ‘affiliate’.
For example, with Vectorstock I uploaded my elephant design so that other people with laser cutters can use it in their own designs. Then every time someone purchases a licence for the elephant, I receive a few cents, but there is no extra cost to the purchaser. Win/win!
Similarly, with affiliate links and referral schemes, you can also receive small payments just for pointing people towards something that they are already interested in. As another example, if you include the banners/ads for these services (like the ones shown above) you could receive a small payment each time someone signs up and/or purchases a licence.
Hope you enjoyed this post. Don’t forget to say ‘hi’ via the contact us page, or to tweet me @LaserSister if you’ve tried any of the above ideas or if you’ve got comments or questions.
