Laser cutting Pride pins

2021-Jun-23, Wednesday 05:45 pm
Because of the month that's in it, I decided to take some scrap wood and laser-cut out some small Pride flags, to be worn as badges or jewellery. It turned out to be not as easy as it sounds.

I sourced some flag .svgs from wikipedia, and flailed about in Inkscape until I had removed the colour fills, and stroked the paths. Saved out as plain .svg, and brought into Luban for processing. Because I am dealing with a mystery wood, 0.3cm thick, the Definitive Guide really was just a guideline in choosing settings. I had to play around a little.

Photos )

*edit* More flags, all painted;



Variety of wooden flag pins all painted
Photo by [personal profile] chebe

Time to turn my 3D printer into a laser cutter! But what to cut? A while back I got an image from Laura Kampf's shop as a download. It's not available anymore, but can be seen here on a garment. The image has two layers. One says 'Makers love Equality', the other is a heart. I turned the two image layers into SVGs, and then put them through Luban as separate cuts. There is a guide to cutting different materials on the Snapmaker site. Following that I ordered 120gsm A4 paper (that I cut down to squares), and after experimentation settled on these settings;

material thickness: 0.2mm
2 passes
depth 0.1mm
fixed power 50%
jog speed 1500mm/m
work speed 600mm/m



Snapmaker laser cutting paper
Photo by [personal profile] chebe




Next step is using my new stencil with an old screen printing rig I acquired many years ago but never got around to using. The heart is in the background behind the text, so it gets printed first. I layered everything; fabric on the bottom, laser cut stencil, screen mesh, and on top of the mesh I used painters tape to mark off the edges of the area (to prevent paint over-spilling).

Screen printing )



Screen open with fresh two-colour print
Photo by [personal profile] chebe



Once dry I heat set the whole lot, by pressing from the back of the fabric with an iron. The colours bled a little, the red coming through the white a bit more. I haven't washed it yet, so I've yet to see how well the print holds up. What am I going to do with this? I was thinking of cutting it out as a square and using it as a patch, but we'll see. Okay, what next?

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