At tonight’s Wednesday night arts and crafts we had someone that wanted to make their own business cards. He brought his own stack of card stock so it was off to a good start!
He also already designed the artwork so we pulled it into Inkscape and started copy/pasting the cards to fit a bunch onto a single letter size page. This then turned into an impromptu class on how to use Inkscape – which is what makes the makerspace such a great place to come work on projects – you’ll accidentally learn something new! Once we had it all laid out he also added the “cut lines” between the borders of every card. These lines were then opened in the Full Spectrum Retina Engrave software for cutting. We set the speed to 100, power to 40, and number of passes to 3. This allowed us to cut through two sheets of cardstock at once. It still left a little bit of ash around the edges so perhaps even lower power next time? We decided it would be the card’s “gimmick” to leave the ash on your fingers as a way to help remember him. His management team liked his cards so much that they were featured on their company news.
Here’s some photos from tonight’s business card laser cutting lesson: