Fan Made Presents


Fun DIY for books

I really enjoyed the novels of the discovery of witches and since my wife also likes it, it gives me a great resource for presents!

So here I would like to explain a short step by step of the little things I was able to make for her (and for me!).

Laser engraving!

First I wanted to come up with a design. At this point I had only read the first book and my wife was very careful of not giving me any spoilers. So using Inkscape and the resource library it uses, I came up with a simple design. I released it to the public domain in Open clipart. It was very easy to do: as you can see the moon and star are basic shapes and the rest I had to simply remix other drawings found in the library.

So that the laser cutter etches the insides I needed to convert my scalable vector graphics to dxf. In the conversion I needed to make sure there is a filling so I borrowed a tool from engineering called hatch filling normally used to show, in an engineering drawing, a section cut. Of course, Inkscape already has an eggbot extension that allows just that! I added some text to make it more complete (context is everything!).

Now the fun part: I cycled over to my near by wicks. And got a bit of timber wood. Normally this is not a good idea because of the grains. The laser cutter cuts the bits without grains deeper than the ones with grains. But it is cheap! Look out for sustainably sourced wood!

I then sand it down so that there is not sharp edges (using a sanding machine in cre-8, not by hand!) it is now ready to put into the Laser cutter which is available at RML, with some careful alignment it was ready to go!

A little bit of cleaning and it was done.

Badge making

It is viewing party day! People at All Souls Con prepared a little kit with pictures that were meant for cake but we had badges thanks to our friend @kubsat.

We had some filler material from some left over presents and I used it to hold the badges in place. It also helped to avoid the wrinkles. Pro tip: make sure the circles are slightly smaller than the space for the badge. That avoids wrinkles.

I put on some music: Bilma and got to it, by the time the music was over I was almost done!

Final edit: We really enjoyed it!

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A Community Interest

C4AD was registered as a Private company limited by guarantee without share capital Community Interest Company (CIC). In short: not for profit and asset locked. The company's activities will provide benefit to those living in the South West London area and beyond with the use of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths. STEM needs Arts to be successful so at C4AD S.T.E.A.M. is promoted: the aim is to demystify STEAM. The company is no more, but the activities continue as a free time activity!