I thought you might like to read about how I design and make my laser cut puzzles, so I shall start at the beginning! 50 Ghosts was my first design which I developed whilst learning to use my laser cutting machine which is an Xtool M1 10W diode laser.
I draw the designs on my iPad with Adobe Illustrator which gives me a vector I can import into the software for my laser cutter. With this being my first puzzle the initial cut was very exciting, but didn’t go very well! I had to interrupt before it was finished as the pieces were falling over and then it was trying to cut things which weren’t there! 😂 Not a good plan where lasers are concerned!
It cut enough for me to decide that the strict square border I had designed wasn’t going to be so much fun to solve, so I had a little redesign, removing the border and adding more ghosts, and then tried again, which thankfully went much better! If you look closely you can see that I move all the supports close together to stop the pieces falling.
With all the pieces cut I then took the border piece, painted it black, and stuck it to a base which I had engraved with a little surprise 😁 Then each puzzle wass carefully reassembled which gave me a change to check that every piece had cut through correctly and looked good!
I was very pleased with my first little pile of finished puzzles 😁 Then even more pleased when they sold out! ☺️
If you missed out on the 50 Ghosts puzzle and would really like one, feel free to send me a message 👻