Assignment 8: Final Project
The original concept
I just got married on saturday, December 3rd, and as you can guess, the months leading up to the wedding were full of planning. I decided to utilize this class to make some exciting things for my wedding.
There are 2 parts of the project:
- Wedding Contract Framing Mat
- Cake Topper
The updated plan
Based on comments from Prof. Nadya last class, it did seem ambitious to try to do 2 completely different projects (3D printed cake topper + Laser-Cut Wedding Contract Frame, all while travelling to Colorado for my wedding). I decided to maintain the idea but shift the approach – continue to make both items except focus on laser cutting/subtractive manufacuting.
Techniques I used for this project
- Laser Cutting: Cutting paper, laser engraving and cutting wood
- Grasshopper: To design the paper structure pattern (algorithmic modeling)
- Rhino: To resize and adapt algorithmic model and add a frame and prepare for finalizing,
- Incorporating stock parts: (Since I pivoted away from 3D printing, I needed a 4th technique)
Bill of Materials 💵
Ketubah
| Material | Status | Store |
|---|---|---|
| Frontal Paper | To purchase | Boulder Craft, Colorado |
| Middle Paper | To purchase | Boulder Craft, Colorado |
| Printed Ketubah on Linen Paper | To purchase | Associated Printers, Colorado |
| Frame | To purchase | Blick, Seatlle |
| Double-sided Tape | To purchase | Blick, Seattle |
Cake Topper
| Material | Status | Store |
|---|---|---|
| Cake | To purchase | Bakery in Colorado |
| Acrylic | To purchase | TAP Plastics |
| Wood | Found | Mill Scrap Bin |
| Butcher Block Sealant | Own |
Project Timeline 💵
Wedding Contract
I took a Domestika class on Grasshopper. They rely on the Lunchbox plugin, which is a Windows only tool. Fortunately, I was able to find a youtube video explaining how to install windows only plugins on Rhino for Mac. I also installed Parakeet as it is another common alogrithimic pattern tool maker.
- Insight: Download the tool, and drag and drop the file into Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/McNeel/Rhinoceros/7.0/Plug-ins/Grasshopper/Libraries
Within Grasshopper, I designed a concentric circle pattern and kept iterating on versions of the organization until I found one I liked, iterating again and again. I kept baking designs into Rhino, cleaning up excess or overlap, and picking versions I liked before bringing them into
In order to constrain myself and keep the document somewhat sentimental, I required myself to have two parameters 42 and 72, the coordinates of where I met my wife.
Besides the digital aspects of the project, I still needed to finalize the fabircation which meant acquiring materials. Mainly paper.
Paper 1: The ketubah, our vows basically – these needed to be printed after I designed it. One thing I didn’t realize is that at certain sizes, print shops will not be able to print on decent paper – only an ugly coated poster paper, which wouldn’t work for aesthetic and practicality reasons (ink would smudge.
So working in the table of a print shop, I had to adjust the the sizing, and margins in order to fit a 12x18 nice creamy paper – so I had to adjust and compromise, but alas it worked.
Paper 2: I needed two papers to be the top 2, so we found a hand-crafted paper store and began attempting different pairings until we found two that stood out. It was important to think about back ups and options, as I was flying with this paper to Seattle, from Boulder in order to laser-cut it 2 days before the wedding.
After selecting the paper I was off to Seattle, where I began my laser cutting adventures.
I began by ironing my paper so it was flat and could properly fit into the laser cutter. Then I cut it into 2, so I’d have multiple backups incase something went awry.
I started by cutting a basic circle in the first paper. Although it was thin paper, the basic settings for paper were required since this paper had random strings in it as it was handmade. I had to do some light trimming but that’s OK
Then, the next step was to cut out the pattern, after adjusting the layer order and some tests to ensure the holes would be cut out, I went through with the cutting. For the most part it looked great, but I needed to spend about an hour extracting leftover circles with an X-acto knife.
Then put it into a frame that was perfectly made for this cut, 16x16, and used double-sided tape to maintain it’s composition since a small shift should make it unaligned.
I flew with it as my carry-on this Friday!
FINAL
2. Cake Topper
Originally I thought I’d use acrylic, but after a chat with the people from the Mill, I was told it wasn’t possible to have depth from a photo. Wood however was a great way to include depth, so I went to the scrap wood can started cutting away a piece of a good size.
I took a photo of us from our engagement and vectorized it using Image Trace in Illustrator. I clean it up, made a shape around with offset path, and included some text of the wedding date.
I made the outline a 0.001 and the rest was engraved with the following settings
Once it was done and cut, I clean it well with soap and applied butcher block mineral oil to the word to make it shine and to seal any pores.
FINAL
Source files