Hippo Badge

 At the start of lockdown hubby, knowing we would be in the house for many hours with be among 'The Sheltering' bought a new toy for me to play with, something I have wanted for a long long time but far beyond my budget lol - a laser cutter.  He had found a cheap way for me to add this magical piece of equipment to my crafting items - a K40.  The laser is a small one but will take just over A4 size and due to the cheap price needed a tremendous amount of his time and knowledge with electronics etc. to make it work as it should.  Not a machine for the faint hearted as it really does not work 'out of the box'.  Anyway after his tinkering for about 8 weeks, levelling the bed, strengthening this and that, creating new brackets etc. for the mirrors and a bunch of other things finally it was working like a dream and worth every penny.  So with a new toy I wanted then to try ways of using digis other than just for my card making and have lots of ideas lined up.  One of them is making some layered badges which is what I have done here.  The badge below is cut out of 3 layers of 1mm MDF and then painted with acrylic paint, the digi used is Cuddly Critters Hippo.

In order to have the laser cut the sections I converted the image to a line vector graphic using Illustrator. I then removed all the lines I did not need and changed the colour to red for the lines I wanted the laser to cut deep enough to leave a mark but not deep enough to cut through the MDF.  The black outline is the cutting line.

 

With the base layer sorted (I should have mentioned earlier that I copied the vector line image 3 times so I had a copy to work with for each layer), I then carried out the same process for the middle layer.

Finally I created the top layer.

With all three layer ready I imported the images into the software I used for the laser, in this case, Lightburn.  I then set the black line to be a full cut sorting out my speed and power %, enough to cut without setting fire to anything lol, and the red lines set to a faster speed and lower power so as to leave a mark but not cut through the MDF.

Once the sections were cut I then glued them together with wood glue and when dry painted with acrylic paint.  To finish off a badge clip was glued to the back.  A great fun project and quite a learning curve but worth it I think :)