Our school’s makerspace is full of machines, big and small, including several laser cutters. It seemed scary. You could set something on fire and then the whole school would burn down and it would be all your fault. Turns out an 8 year old is allowed to use the laser cutter.

With that in mind, I still asked a TA to guide me through my first cutting session, but turns out it’s just as easy as printing something. First, I experimented with making business cards and just cards in general.

Then, I decided to introduce something else I was interested in: single weight line art illustration!

I created an illustration in Illustrator, then converted it for cutting. It took several sessions to find settings and set up that reduced burnt edges while retaining the weight of the lines. In the end, cutting with a cover sheet that would later be scrapped seemed to fare the best.

Since I was running out of time, I decided to go ahead and stencil my best cut instead using gold spray paint.

The gift set also included a card featuring a hand-colored reindeer.

The gold line motif was repeated on the envelopes.

This was my first foray into creating a modular gift set, but I was pleased with the results!

A flatlay of the giftset.

Thanks to Morgan McMahon for helping me photograph the flatlays!