Laser cut ornaments and gift tags

'Tis the season for some handcrafted gifts! Last year I had fun making dumpster fire ornaments. I grabbed a dumpster and fire SVG from Wikicommons, offset the path to create a cut outline and manufactured some a terrible momento of the year that was.

This year I thought I could be a bit more positive and help make egg nog a bit more palatable. I saw some ornaments online that cleverly held a mini liquor bottle and played on the "another shot" theme of vaccines and whatnot. I wanted to use a mini rum bottle because of eggnog so needed to draw the ornament around the shape:

Adobe Capture works really well in auto-tracing outlines from photos. It also kept the scale which made it easier to size the whole ornament. My first design had a huge bow on the top where I thought I could etch in names but it was much too large once the bottle was added. I was really close in making the cutout for the "Take another shot" text shape fit inside the bottle cutout with the syringe but it just didn't work out.

As with any large project I had lots of leftover scrap wood, most only a few square inches. A great project to use up scrap wood is making personalized gift tags:

Find or draw an outline of gift tag. If you're using an image you convert to paths by going Object > Image Trace > Make and Expand. You may need to force a certain Image Trace setting, for example "Black and White" or "logo." Delete any extra paths that get generated, and any other elements that you don't need such as the hole. Since I'm adding letters and cutting out the negative space the hole is useless.

Drop in a text block with your name. Choose a font that has appropriate vertical height and adjustable kerning. I used League Gothic and was happy with the default kerning so I just scaled the vertical to have a bit of overlap with the inner tag path. Each letter must enough overlap at the top and bottom so it remains attached.

Use the direct selection tool to select the gift tag anchors on the right side. Stretch out those points to enclose the whole name. Make sure to hold down Shift to lock the horizontal plane as you stretch.

We now need to merge the text with the ring but only keep the outside edges. In other words, we don't want to cut out the entire letter, just the parts that are not touching the gift tag. Select the text box, Type > Create Outlines. Remove the fill and change the stroke to match your laser cutter settings (I used black 0.25pt). With the textbox still selected direct selection only the inner path of the gift tag and use Pathfinder > Shape Mode > Minus Front. Tada!