WEEK 1: LASER CUT PICKLES

This week’s addition to the sandwich I am apparently building is pickles.

DAY 1: 

I went back on forth on what to make for this new addition to my sandwich. I ended up going with pickle slices because I love pickles and I thought the texture of the seeds would be fun to play around with on the laser cutter. I made a design in Illustrator and printed it using some scrap cardboard. By some happy accident, I ended up with these grooves from the interior of the cardboard that totally resemble crinkle-cut pickle slices:

I noticed some of the seeds fell off because of of corrugation, but I don’t hate it. Then I decided to go for it and make the bigger pickle slice. I used the same file, just scaled up the design. It took so long to print!!!


I love how it turned out though. The textures are so awesome and I love how the seeds look.

Next, I decided to make a few more little ones. I made the outer border a little thicker and printed 3 of them. They turned out great!


The whole cardboard pickle family:


I’m going to get some wood and cut the little ones from wood and see how I like them. I might try to play around with diagonal lines of rastering to get the crinkle-cut effect without using cardboard because it’s quite flimsy.

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DAY 2:

I got a sheet of birch wood from the Makerspace to re-cut the pickle slices. I cut out the tiny one first and it turned out exactly how I wanted, so I went ahead and cut 2 more. But when I checked if they had cut out completely, I didn’t set it back down in the exact spot as before and the outline got messed up.


Then, I scaled up that same design and printed it to be almost the entire height of the wood. It took almost 30 minutes to print!!!