Engraving with the Glowforge, a recipe on a cutting board.

1. Intro: Hey friends, welcome to the She Shed. I'm Rose Sprinkle and it's raining, which means it's a perfect day today for crafting. Today I'm going to show you how to use a Glowforge laser printer to engrave a favorite recipe on a cutting board. 2. What is the Glowforge: Before we dive into our project, let me talk a little bit about the Glowforge and why I think it's an absolute must-have to start making it. I stole that from Amy Poehler from Making It show because I love it. It's one of my favorites. Anyways, I have a referral link down below for an extra $500 off if you're interested in getting a Glowforge for yourself but let me tell you a little bit about why this is amazing. The Glowforge is a laser printer and basically what that means is it can engrave or cut through organic materials like wood, stone, acrylic, even cloth or fabric. That makes it great for hobbyists or crafters like you and me because now we can turn our side hustles into profitable incomes. Glowforge was really smart and they saw a need in the industry and flipped it on its head, similar to how Airbnb did it with the hospitality industry. Now people are making really cool stuff like, I don't know, cosplay costumes, or children's toys, or earrings and jewelry, or furniture. There's tons of things that you can make. 3. Materials You'll Need: For your materials for this, basically what you'll need to do is choose a recipe. This is my family recipe handwritten down. [MUSIC] It's called the mug spaghetti sauce. It's a restaurant my family used to own, but this recipe comes all the way from Sicily, Italy. Super exciting to have generational things in my family. You can either choose a recipe and do it by hand with handwritten notes, or you can always put it into your iPad using a program like Procreate, so you can just upload a vector version into the computer. You'll also need a computer obviously. You'll either need a camera or a scanner to be able to upload your recipe. Then you'll also need a cutting board of your choice and also preferably some digital calipers to be able to measure the width of your board and, of course, the Glowforge. 4. Measuring for the Glowforge: Before we engrave our cutting board, we need to first do our measuring and prep the Glowforge. The rule of the Glowforge is your materials need to be a half inch or less in order to cut on top of the crumb tray. Now, if your material is a lot thicker, and it's over a half an inch, then you need to remove the crumb tray and actually place material on the bottom of the Glowforge. This is where digital calipers are super handy because it's going to give you a really exact measurement. It really does need to be exactly a half inch or less, otherwise, the Glowforge is not going to recognize it and be able to cut, you'll get an error in your software. I'm going to go ahead and measure the cutting board that we're going to be using, so simply just take your calipers and you're going to close it in and this gives me a reading of 0.4960, so that means that I don't need to remove my crumb tray and I can put it exactly on top just like this and basically be ready to go. Now, you don't need to get a cutting board this size, you can go a lot wider, if it's over a half inch, it needs to be an inch and a half to two inches to be able to cut without the crumb tray. I'm going to show you what that looks like, I'm going to take this out and I'm gently going to remove this. There's a lip here which makes it easy to pull up, and this isn't tied to anything, so you just need to carefully lift it and pull it out, so I'm going to do that really quick. Okay, so here's the bottom of my Glowforge pan. If I had a much thicker cutting board, I would put it down here, but if it's not meeting that one and a half to two inches, then all you need to do get a scrap piece of wood or material that's ideally not flammable and put it under your cutting board. I have here like a wood stick, I don't know why, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer style, but you simply just put that down, cover it up with your cutting board and now it should be about high enough to be able to have the laser meet. 5. Using Transfer Tape: Now we have our cutting board measured, there are a few other tips that I want to talk about that I'll make it a little bit easier. The first is to experiment with transfer tape or without. Whenever you're using a non-proof material or just like any scrap piece of wood that you have or bought from a store, you want to experiment it with transfer tape. This is Blue Man tape. This is one of my favorite transfer tapes, you can just get it off of Amazon. We love Amazon. I'll show you two engraving tests using this tape and not using it. If you can see these two side-by-side, this is without transfer tape and this one is with. This one, as you can see around these letters, it has a little bit of scorching from the laser, a little bit of burning. The transfer tape is going to give you a little bit of a cleaner edge so this one looks so much nicer than this one. I would highly recommend experimenting with your materials and seeing what works best. I've heard tons of horror stories where people just put their material in and they don't use transfer tape or experiment first with their settings and you can ruin an entire piece of expensive material or time doing it that way. Always do test cuts first before you're ready to do your final piece. Let me go ahead and put this out. I'm going to put the crumb tray back in because my board cannot be cut at this length. 6. Scan in Artwork (1 2) Using Glowforge: Now that we're done measuring our board, I'm going to show you two ways in which you can upload your recipe into the Glowforge software to be able to start engraving. The Glowforge already has a camera attached to the inside of the width, which is super nice because anytime you place your artwork down on the crumb tray, you're going to be able to see where it is so you can easily place your artwork. You don't really need an external scanner if you have the Glowforge. You simply just place your recipe down below, and then you're going to close the lid so it's able to read. Then I'm going to head over to my computer and scan the recipe. Now that we have our recipe put into the Glowforge, we simply just need to click "Trace" up in the left-hand corner. What that does it's going to show us the recipe and we just need to drag a square around the actual recipe itself. Now for mine, you can see that there's this little leaf pulling in, so that might be an issue, so I may need to rewrite it later. But just so you know how to do this in the Glowforge we'll go ahead and do as is. I'm going to get it as close as I can as possible. Well, let go, and then see how it's scanning all of this information. I'm just going to click the white area that I don't want. Then it's going to highlight everything that I do. Now it's highlighted, I just say, place artwork, and it's going to render what is my original mom's writing. Now we have the recipe itself. This is perfect because what is behind is just the image of the recipe in the Glowforge. If I take that out and then place my cutting board, then I can just place this exactly on top of my cutting board. Let me go ahead and do that really quick. Now you can see that the picture has updated in the background from the Glowforge. Now I can see my actual cutting board and I place it sloppily. I wouldn't do this normally, I place it nicely and I'll show you that in a little bit. But then you just take this, scale it up and then you'd be ready to go. That's one way. I'm going to show you a second way in which you can upload your recipe. 7. Engraving Settings: I've pulled it into Photoshop, and right away I'm just going to create a copy of my layer because I never want to alter the native file. I'm going to turn this layer off, and then simply I'm going to convert this to black and white. Then I'm also going to give a curves files. That way we can really add some contrast and make sure our blacks are really apparent. So I'm do that and I'm going to up my white. Now we can start to see the grain of the paper fade away. Make sure my layer is highlighted. I'm going to take my magic wand and I'm quickly going to select the background and I'm just going to delete it. Safer way would be if you just mastered out instead so you don't lose that quality, but we always have our native file here. This works out well. I'll do apple D to deselect, and now we have an isolated on a transparent background. I'm going to go ahead and save this. I'm going to say save a copy to make it a ping. Then we want to make sure that we save this as a high res file. We can go to hit "Save", say large file. I'm going to just hit Option Command I and make sure the resolution is at 300. That way it's really clear and crystal. Perfect when we pull it into the Glowforge so we're good there. Don't need to worry so much about size, about this one because we can scale it later in the Glowforge software and it should fit perfectly on this board size that I have. We'll just go ahead and leave that alone. Now we're ready to upload that into our dashboard. If you go into the Glowforge software, this is your dashboard up here, and I've already uploaded it, but basically you'll just say upload and then you can choose your file. I already have it here, so I'm just going to go ahead and open this. It's just going to take a second to show me my inside of the Glowforge. The Glowforge actually has a camera on the inside of the lid. Once you place your materials, you can place your design and rotate it or move it as you need to. It's really easy to do. Here we can see, here's my recipe right here. I'm just going to make sure that I move it and center it on my cutting board. Then over here we're going to click on the top left corner and we're going to do our settings. Because this isn't a proof gate material that Glowforge cells, we have to put it in manually our settings. Here for a good setting for a bamboo cutting board, I'm going to do a 1,000 for my speed and 40 for my precision power. It might alter based on what model of the Glowforge you have. I have the Glowforge pro, but you might just need to do some test runs with either your speed or your power depending on what model you have. Then for my gray scale, I always say very power and that should be good to go. Now, we need to auto-focus on the cutting board to make sure that the Glowforge can measure the width of the material. The reason why is because it needs to know how high or how low that laser is so it can meet the material exactly where it is. Simply click on the three ellipses here to hit more, and then say set focus. Then you're going to have these little crosshairs appear, and you're going to click on your design. Then it'll auto calibrate. Then simply just go up into your right hand corner and say the print button. You're going to hear a Glowforge, make these noises because it's focusing on the materials. Then we're simply going to press this green glowing button to make it. We're going to do that again. Here we go. 8. Closing: [MUSIC] Well, thanks for joining me guys. I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about the Glowforge. Don't forget about my referral link. Also please upload a picture of your class project of your delicious recipes that I know will steal from myself. If you want to learn more about how to cut using the Glowforge, then go ahead and take a look at my other video where I'll be making some fun Christmas ornaments. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you soon.