This week marks our final week at the CU FabLab, where we had spent 3 wonderful weeks learning from the professionals in the lab.

Laser cutting was this week’s theme, and the variety of application of it was honestly mind blowing! With the lasers, we could print designs on notebooks, pieces of acrylic plastic, or wood, which also happens to be my medium of choice.

I wanted to make a keychain for my best friend, whose birthday was this week. The process itself was relatively simple: Find a picture, open it in the program, vector it, clean up anything else that you don’t want, draw a 0.01 border around it so that the laser knows where to cut, save as a pdf and bring it over to the printer! While the safety precautions can seem pretty overwhelming, it’s basically turning on many machines to ensure that there is continuous airflow to prevent anything from spontaneously combusting since the laser was essentially burning the wood.

Of course, being such a lover of the game Neko Atsume, I couldn’t resist printing some cute keychains for myself as well.

I’m glad to have been able to learn about laser cutting/printing, since I now know how to utilize a resource for creating professional looking art designs that require etching. Our organization had wanted to do something similar to this but the sheer cost to do this commercially was too high. Now I’m glad I’ll be able to help them out since I can definitely go back to the lab to do it myself.