This is the latest piece I’ve been commissioned to make – a ‘new baby’ keepsake gift. It’s a laser-cut wooden heart with the baby’s name and date of birth, and I’ve also spelled out the baby’s name in the little wooden blocks. The customer who commissioned it requested “NO STORKS!”, so I’ve created a stork-free design:
(No idea why there are fuzzy bits in the image. Maybe I need to clean the phone’s camera lenses. Anyway, you get the idea.)
I tried to incorporate lots of baby-themed elements but without being too sickly sweet. See how many you can spot! (Did I miss any traditional baby-related themes? You can use the comments section below to let me know what I should add next time.)
(And is it just me, or does that dummy look like it’s got eyes and a smiling mouth?!)
I like the filigree-type feel of this design. It feels a bit more special and delicate than just etching a design or message onto a solid sheet of wood.
I think it also has elements in common with some of my other work, like the wedding heart woodcut
That wedding heart is now on my TikTok shop, but I still need to upload the new baby keepsake gift woodcut to the TT shop.
Following on from yesterday’s papercut Valentine heart design, I have now cut the same design, to get a filigree Valentine heart woodcut:
Here is a YouTube video of me cutting it with the laser machine (an Epilog Fusion Edge).
I’m really pleased with how these look – either as papercuts or from wood, and at small or large scale.
In fact, I’m so pleased with the design that I’m going to put it for sale on my shop. Woohoo! Or rather, Woo Commerce!
While cutting this I was listening to the audiobook of Joanna Penn’s newly-released “How to Write Non-Fiction” (second edition). There are a LOT of useful tips in there, which I will hopefully be putting into practice later this year. I am feeling very creative at the moment, and so 2025 seems like I might be able to plan ahead far enough to actually start achieving some goals.
I’ve got loads of projects and designs that I’m working on, so I hope they all turn out as well as this design. This is what the filigree hearts look like when they’ve been cut out and are hanging up on a wall:
Do you like the design? Could I improve it? Let me know in the comments below!
Throughout 2023 there was a load of hooha around AI (artificial intelligence) in the news and online. Many writers, artists and makers seemed to be lining up to say how awful it was, but I felt pretty open-minded about it. I was persuaded by the opinions of people like Joanna Penn from the Creative Penn podcast, who basically said she viewed it as a tool that could work as an “amplifier of human imagination” (as opposed to a replacement for it), but that as with any tool – e.g. the printing press, cameras, the internet – that tool could be used by people in either negative or positive ways.
I was particularly interested in the mention of text-to-image generators, because it appealed to all of the different versions of ‘me’: the me with an MSc in computing, the me with an MA in creative and critical writing, the me with an accidental MRes in education, and the overall me who loves learning and making new things.
So at the very end of 2023 when my Christmas craft rush was over, I thought I would have a play with some AI image generators to see if they might be useful in my own artwork…
…and it was FUN!
This is the first ever AI-generated image that I produced, using Adobe Firefly: [oh by the way, the links on this page are all just for information – none of them are affiliate links and I’m not sponsored by any products]
I was completely blown away. I’d used the prompt “Letter ‘K’ with doodle flower art, output as a vector image for a papercutting design“, and it came out looking like one of my own sketchbook doodles – only better.
AI disappointments
However, I discovered that even though Firefly has a specific theme of ‘Vector look’, I couldn’t find a way to get it to actually generate SVG/vector images. Maybe this will change in future, but at the moment (January 2024) it looks like Firefly can’t generate vectors so you have to use Adobe Illustrator instead. I did start a free trial of Illustrator, but (1) it was really stingy with the number of images that could be generated, (2) the images were so rubbish that I never even bothered saving any, let alone using them, and (3) considering those first two points, I couldn’t justify going ahead with a paid subscription when the package didn’t do what I needed it to do.
Having tested Firefly and Illustrator, I thought I’d try out another AI image generator. After a Google search trying to find an image generator that could output vector graphics, I discovered Kittl. Like Firefly, it produced some really interesting initial results for me…
…but like Firefly, it had some drawbacks. Again, everything may have changed by the time you read this, but at the moment Kittl seems to be unable to reliably create anything with letters or words in it.
For example, can you guess what letters these are below? “X”? “B”?:
Nope – they’re both the letter K, according to Kittl. Sigh. Back to the drawing board (literally).
AI Wins
So I went back to Firefly to see if it could handle letters any better than Kittl. It could (mostly). Here’s what I got with the prompt “Large serif letter ‘J’ decorated with waves” I really liked it – even though the decoration looks more like a feather than waves:
I saved the image, loaded it into some software that can convert images to SVG files (“Curve“), and then tweaked the image a bit.
And so I created my first-ever piece of AI-assisted laser art. Because after editing parts of the SVG file, I etched the J onto a “scribbles that matter” bullet journal for my sister, and gave it to her for Christmas.
Instead of taking hours to create, it took 10 seconds to generate the initial image, then about half an hour of tweaking the vector file. I am now thinking that AI will supercharge my creativity and artistic output, because…
AI-assisted designs versus my traditional method
Let’s compare the AI-assisted process to my usual method of creating a design:
With my traditional method, first I round up lots of reference images (from books, my own photos, and/or other media like Creative Commons images, licenced images, and images that are in the public domain.) With all of these images I then begin to ‘synthesise’ elements and shapes in my sketchbook – i.e. combine them into what feels to me like a summary of the images.
[IOU a screenshot of my digital sketchbook here, but in the meantime just imagine a load of seagulls in different positions and from different angles]
The eventual design is therefore an original artwork that references all of those other images, but doesn’t copy them. What I’m aiming for is to try to get to the concentrated “essence” of a shape. So from the images above I am attempting to create the most seagull-y seagull possible. I want people to look at the image and instantly think, “Yep, that’s a seagull”. It should be a design that represents a seagull. It’s not one specific seagull that really exists in the world, but rather an amalgamation of many examples which make up the seagully-est design I can manage.
Example of the final seagull on a fridge magnet, which I’ve been selling via some small shops and galleries:
The whole process often takes between two and five days (I tend to take longer for historic buildings than I do for animals). This is fine for products that I will be able to sell in large quantities, because the cost of my time will eventually be repaid – albeit in very small chunks – e.g. a fraction per sale from each fridge magnet or Christmas bauble. And that time is also OK for pieces that I make for family or friends, because I’m creating the items purely for their (and my) enjoyment.
But what happens if someone wants to commission a piece of unique artwork from me? If it takes me a day to design and make, then I’ll probably have to charge over £100, which would put my work out of reach of most people. Plus I’m also not currently well-known enough as an artist to attract many of those customers anyway.
The way that papercutting artists usually get round this pricing problem is to spend time creating a template, which has the same overall design but key parts of it can be customised. For example, my Christmas baubles share the same filigree designs, but can then be adapted to include individual names inside them:
What I would really love is to create a completely unique item for each person, but for the process to only take me about an hour instead of a couple of days…
AI Aid
…That’s where the AI comes in.
Remember the “artistic synthesis” stage above, when I created the most seagull-y seagull that I could manage but it took me two or three days? This is where AI might be able to revolutionise my design process.
AI engines are basically able to follow the same process as me, but in about ten seconds instead of ten hours. They can access thousands of images of seagulls, compare them to each other, and come up with their own version of a seagull based on the similarities in the images. Great!
Or is it?
Unfortunately, the AI doesn’t actually know what it’s doing. If it produces an image that is pleasing to humans, that’s probably pretty much by accident. It may have come to a similar output design as mine, but it’s done it through brute force and ignorance rather than by artistic judgement. Probably the only reason it has come up with a human-pleasing design is that humans tend to only upload/share images that they actually find attractive in the first place, so those are the inputs on which the AI is basing its outputs.
My theory is based on experiences during the last couple of weeks. I’ve learned that AI image generators are capable of producing some nice-looking images, but that they make errors that no human would ever make. For example, the images below show that the Kittl AI came up with some recognisable designs of ballerinas…but they featured anything between 0 and 4 legs. I would suggest that four out of those five options represent a non-standard number of legs:
And since when do ballerinas wear stilletos?! Similarly, in the last two weeks I’ve seen an awful lot of 2-tailed cats, plus a 14-fingered woman (6 on one hand and 8 on the other, just for info).
Yes, but is it really ART?
This is not a new debate. Marcel Duchamp famously sparked outrage with his 1917 “sculpture” piece called Fountain. (It wasn’t a fountain – it was a mass-produced urinal.) And heck, is photography really art? Over 100 years after these questions originally surfaced we are still basically asking the same questions about art and/or artists. Can Andy Warhol be considered the creator of all of his Factory of artworks? (check out Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales podcast episode for a good discussion about Warhol’s work.)
I think for most people there is a sliding scale of what counts as an “artwork” or an “artist”, and what counts as “original”, “influenced by”, “derivative”, “pastiche”, or “blatantly plagiarised”. It’s often a very personal decision, depending partly on the intent and skill of the artist, and partly on the interpretation of the beholder. Billions of digital photographs are taken every year, but surely only a tiny percentage of those photos are intended/interpreted as art, even though they may have all been created using the same basic equipment.
AI generated art versus AI assisted art
I personally am convinced that the images that AIs come up with are at least original. Every human artist has been influenced by other artists or artistic movements – whether consciously or not – so as long as the elements of the AI reference images have been legally obtained and have genuinely been influenced rather than directly copied then the method of creation seems OK. If it’s good enough for humans, it’s good enough for AI.
But for me, there is a difference between AI generated pieces and AI assisted pieces. Thanks again to Joanna Penn of the Creative Penn podcast for bringing up this distinction. AI can produce some fantastic images, based on prompts by humans. Do we call those humans “artists”, though? At the moment I’m leaning toward saying yes, because I can think of established artists who already use pre-existing objects in their artworks. One of my favourite artists is Andy Goldsworthy, whose work has included ice, leaves, rocks, branches, twigs. When I think about the processes that he must go through in order to get from the start to the finish of an artwork, I could argue that they are vaguely similar processes to those of people who work with text-to-image generators. They have to come up with an idea or prompt in the first place, but then (if my experiments so far are anything to go by) the artists may have to discard tens or even hundreds of the generated images in order to end up with just the one “right” image. I’d bet that Andy Goldsworthy doesn’t use every leaf or rock or ice shard that he sees while he’s creating his artworks, and that he carefully selects exactly the right objects for exactly the right positions. And I can’t remember who originally declared it, but don’t many photographers say that the secret of being a good photographer is to discard all of the bad photos? The perceived artistry therefore comes partly through the ideas and decisions that the humans have made during the production and/or presentation of their works.
That makes a lot of sense to me, so I’m satisfied that people who use unedited AI-generated art do have some claim to being creators of art.
However with my own work I’d like to go one or two steps further than just churning out images that have been made for me by a computer. For a start, I rarely get a result that looks perfect to me. Nearly all of them have some element that either looks plain wrong (three-legged ballerina, anyone?!), or maybe doesn’t fit well with the rest of the image, or doesn’t match the prompt words. Therefore I almost always have to change the prompts, and to find ways to edit the images to make them fit my notion of “good”.
After that I’ll convert the image into an SVG file and then edit that file for another hour or two. Finally, I’d like to actually turn the image into some kind of physical item (e.g. like the “J” bullet journal above). Maybe more about those additional stages in a later post, but for now I’m just happy to report that because of the stages my work goes through, I regard my recent experiments as being AI assisted rather than AI generated. An awful lot of me will be going into the final pieces, and the main difference between these artworks and my usual ones is that a lot of the time-consuming “synthesis” stage has been speeded up for me by the use of an AI tool. I feel like it’s the equivalent of Andy Goldsworthy taking a team of assistants with him when he’s going to make a leaf-based art installation, and saying to each of them “Bring me a bucket of orange and yellow autumn leaves that don’t have any bits of green in them”. He would still be creating the actual artwork, but would also be saving himself some time. I guess it’s also like painters buying their paints from shops, instead of grinding and mixing the colours themselves.
This is only the very beginning of my adventures with AI-generated artwork, and I’m hoping to explore them a lot more during the rest of 2024. I know it’s still a very contentious issue with a lot of people, but for me, for now, it’s FUN. I think that as long as I’m honest about my creative processes then it should be up to me to use whatever tools I want. Just as I wouldn’t try to pass off my laser-cut artworks as being cut by hand, I won’t be telling people that my pieces aren’t influenced by an AI if they actually are. On the other hand though, if I’ve spent a lifetime enjoying Art Nouveau and Celtic knotwork, I don’t think I should be expected to calculate what percentage of each of my artworks has been influenced by those genres if my pieces somehow all end up with flowers or sinuous lines in them.
Creative goals for 2024:
Bearing all of the above in mind, I really do want to continue exploring AI text-to-image generators, and to see where they might lead my work. Therefore here is a ‘goal declaration’ for 2024:
My creative goal for this year is to create at least 52 AI-assisted physical artworks.
I have no idea what they will be yet, but off the top of my head I can think of jewellery, coasters, decorated boxes, wall hangings, gifts, and adult-colouring-page cards. I’m really excited about this challenge and think I’ll learn a lot from it (and hopefully produce some interesting art along the way).
In the meantime if anyone else is having fun with AI generated images but doesn’t have their own laser cutter, I’m happy to discuss possible suggestions or commissions 😉
This year (2022) I started a new hobby. I am now a marquetry enthusiast (in addition to all of my other craft addictions).
I moved house in 2021 (from the south to the north of England) during the covid lockdowns, so for a very long time I wasn’t able to start any new hobbies that involved seeing real people. But in February 2022 I was wishing for a new group or club to join in Yorkshire, and discovered that Leeds Marquetry Group were restarting their beginners’ sessions that very same week. So I signed up. And it turns out that marquetry is a brilliant pastime for me, because it seems to combine a lot of the skills that I’ve already been building up via my other crafts, over the years.
Through my papercutting experiments I’ve already learned how to use a scalpel to do some very intricate cutting…
…and through my lasercutting artworks I’ve learned some of the characteristics and limitations of working with different types of wood veneers:
So marquetry basically involves a mash-up of my existing craft skills.
The very first project I completed was a Yorkshire Rose coaster:
As with my papercutting projects there are quite a few errors that really jump out at me when I look at this piece, but overall I’m really pleased with it. I designed it myself (starting out with petals that were based on heart shapes) then cut it by hand, and there were some really challenging sections in it.
The best thing about Leeds Marquetry Group is that everyone is so friendly and helpful. In just a few months I’ve learned more about cutting, gluing, sanding and varnishing wood than I could have ever learned from books or the internet. I’m looking forward to learning even more, over the next year.
Here is a lasercut sugar skull pendant – Happy Halloween!
OK, sugar skulls are traditionally more of a ‘Day of the Dead‘ thing than Halloween, but what the heck 🙂
Lasercutters: Can’t be bothered to design your own sugar skull? Why not buy a licence to use someone else’s design? (That link above is to a post I wrote a while ago, about why and how you can fast-forward your lasercutting business by using stock images and designs.)
That’s actually what I did in this case. The design is brilliant and so detailed, and etches really well – so why re-invent the wheel? I bought the extended licence and now I am able to cut and sell this design in my own business. As well as Halloween lasercut sugar skull pendants and earrings, I’m also hoping to adapt it into a papercut version. That might take a while though. Maybe by next Halloween…
I got this particular sugar skull design from Vectorstock (that’s an affiliate link, by the way. Not that I’ve yet made any money from any of my affiliate links, but they are only a minor part of this blog – I just enjoy sharing (and discovering) lasercutting skills and news!)
The best thing about clear acrylic jewellery is that it goes with anything! It’s like wearing a chameleon. Hmm. I might make one of those, one day…
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.
Here is something I’ve been playing with this week – the design of a laser-cut jewellery holder.
I made one for my mum last Christmas…
As you can see, it can hold lots of different types of jewellery (rings, necklaces, bracelets, watches, earrings). However, it still needs some tweaks.
What I like about it is:
As mentioned above, it can hold nearly all types of jewellery. The only exceptions I can think of at the moment are hat pins, scarf pins or brooches.
You can see all of the jewellery in one place. It’s not in a drawer or box, so you get to enjoy your favourite pieces like mini artworks.
It’s personalised and therefore unique.
It’s versatile, so (e.g.) the same horizontal bar can take either hook-type earrings or post-type earrings, and the vertical side bits can hold either rings or bracelets or watches.
Things to improve on the design:
Create a way to hang it so that it is held away from the wall, to make it easier to hang earrings.
Have a way to store brooches and pin-type jewellery (e.g. a tray at the bottom)
As a very basic version though, this is the design that I used:
If you’ve got a laser cutter and you’d like to have a play with this design yourself, I’ve made a vector file available below.
Following on from yesterday when I was excited to find my blog in the top 40 of laser cutting blogs, I have been checking out other blogs on the list and here is a digest of my own favourites (along with the country they are in, in case you are looking for laser cutting services):
Gypsy Soul Laser Cuts (USA) is a lovely blog, with regular updates and lots of craft ideas. They sell laser-cut craft items.
Dragon Powered (UK) has got laser cutting files for sale, to save you having to spend hours designing your own. The blog includes interesting and original information, and technical advice.
Nice Cuts (UK) provide a laser cutting service, and have ideas about how you can use laser cut designs for your own business. They also occasionally have guest bloggers, who share their own experiences of using a laser cutting service.
CUT-TEC (UK) are a laser cutting service and they create really varied laser cut items – including in metal.
Mekkit.com (UK) are another company who produce really varied laser cut products, and have some great photos of their work.
The Altered State (UK) have got at least one great big laser and can cut and etch reeeeally big items.
LaserSister (UK) That’s me! I provide a laser cutting and etching service, but the blog also has technical information about laser cutting, plus news and trends from the lasery world. And will shortly include links to cutting files.
MBJD Laser (USA) seem to pick a different font colour and overall style for every blog post, but I forgive them because they are real people and giving real news about their laser cutting service and products.
Laser Flair (UK) have a laser cutting service and look like they can etch metal and giant pieces of wood for you.
Dot Laser (UK) produce really nice-looking and varied work for clients.
Bespoke Laser UK also produce great looking products, and do an especially nice line in laser-etched bespoke rubber stamps.
LASERCUTIT (UK) have a laser cutting service, for wood, acrylic, paper and card.
Just Add Sharks (UK) have got an article on making a totally mind-blowing ‘phenakistiscope’.
CutLaserCut (UK) work with artists and other businesses to make some really original pieces.
Ponoko (USA, NZ) allow you to upload your artwork, get an instant quote, and then cut and ship the item on the same day. WOW.
Reddit (www) has a thriving laser cutting community and this is a great place to browse and/or ask questions. It does contain quite a bit of spam, but you can easily lose hours just browsing if you are really into laser cutting.
MLC (AUS) have a laser cutting service in Australia, and the blog includes latest trends and news from the lasery world.
Able Engraving (UK) have a traditional engraving service as well as laser engraving, and are experts in signs and awards.
Google News (www) chews up and spits out laser-related news for your information and delight.
(OK, there are only 19 in my current Top 20 list. But the Top 40 list only had 33, so I win!)
Well, this is turning out to be an interesting (and busy!) week.
Checking out my blog stats, it appears that my laser cutting blog is in the top 40 of a list of laser cutting blogs
Woo – some automated software has given me an award!
Disappointingly, there are only 33 websites on the list (I am currently number 30) – so it appears that at the moment if you have a laser cutting blog then you are automatically in the list. On the other hand, (1) I only moved to this website host a few weeks ago, so it’s lucky any web-crawling bots can find me anyway, and (2) at least I’m actually on the list!
