Apologies for dropping the C-bomb in May! When creating things for sale at craft fairs, it is best to start early. You never know what might crop up between now and the end of the year, and to avoid a last-minute rush, I start early. The door hanger blanks arrived last week, and rather than keep moving them around the studio, I got on with my plan for them.
What goes into a ‘simple’ door hanger?
It’s a simple design – but it’s the time it takes to process that is what needs to be paid for. Here’s the step-by-step process I followed over two days (total number crafted: 10).
First (not pictured) measure the wood panel and settle on the design – I used designs from Creative Fabrica and adapted them to the shape.
Second, cut a jig – this will allow each piece to be lined up exactly for each run of the laser. I cut mine from corrugated cardboard on the xTool P2S laser. I cut it in half to take account of the bed size of my F1 Ultra, on which I intended to engrave.
Third, engrave each of the wood panels – top and bottom designs. I use the blue light laser and batch process. Each panel took roughly 2-5 minutes to process, depending on whether a second pass was required.
Note the angle of the engrave – this helped an even engrave across the grain of the wood.
Before I took the engraved piece off the laser, I paused it, added a strip of masking tape and then at the end of the engraving scored the nose outline. This created a mask for the application of flake and glitter glue.
Because the hangers were all different shapes, they didn’t fit snugly in the jig, hence the need to mask before moving the hanger from the laser.
After the glue had dried, I applied red foil. This turned out to have different outcomes depending on the glue application into the grain of the wood. This was one of the better ones. I wanted a shiny opaque background for the other layers I had planned.
The next layer was sparkles with Christmas Red glitter glue (Ranger Stickles). This needs to dry fully before proceeding, and it flattens completely when it does. I leave it for at least 3 hours before checking it.
And for the finale, I mixed a variety of red mica powder and red large glitter into UV resin and dabbed into the nose. I overdid the first couple and found that it didn’t keep it’s shape and flowed over the surrounding wood. I was a lot more careful after that, building it up in several layers and using the UV light much quicker after application.
Any nose that wasn’t domed got another layer of resin.
Any hardened overflow got chipped off with a scalpel. It hadn’t fused to the surrounding wood, so I got away with it.