Vector cut lines from scanned images

'Tis the season and it's another round of ornament making with the laser cutter.  This year's edition features custom names of recipients cutout and placed in a wintery scene filled with reindeer antlers, snowflakes and trees. Those decorations look nice but are practically there to hold the name since it spans across 3" of empty space.

I made the ornamental shape pretty quickly in Illustrator with a few circle. The snowflake, trees and antlers were all royalty-free vector shapes that I further manipulated through stacking. I liberally used the Pathfinder > Unite tool to combine vector lines to create continuous cut lines so nothing fell off.

Adding the names was a straightforward process beginning with selection of font. I went over to Fontsquirrel and chose a few script fonts that had connected letters. This was important so I didn't have to manually create connection points for letters that weren't connected to anything. Great Vibes, Allura and Hello Almeida worked for me but I had to test them each since each name had different amounts of ascenders and descenders that would obscure their shape.

I manually adjusted the size and the shape as little as possible using Selection then Type > Create Outlines. This let me enlarge the actual text shape (Object > Path > Offset Path) since I was concerned certain thinner letters would be too fragile with the 1/8" ply I was using. Pathfinder > Unite finalized the outline shape and I resized further to fit. Then, select the name and the inner ring shape and use Pathfinder > Minus Front to create a compound shape. If too much is subtracted try rearranging the stacked layers so the name is on top.

Each ornament only took around 3 minutes to cut which was quite the time savings from last year's elaborate multi-layered bottle holder ornament. However, while I was working on the ornaments I realized I needed an activity for my Takeaway Makeaway club in the Makerspace. Since the laser cutter was already on I gave them some scrap paper and sharpies and had them design takeaway medallions.

Once they finished their drawings I sent them through our scanner via document feeder which handily sends me a PDF of scanned images. I copied a pic and dropped it into Illustrator. Since each image had a unique shape I needed to create custom cut lines quickly for each image. I used Image Trace (usually Black and White logo since they were monocolour) and expanded the selection to create editable vectors. I left the image on an Engrave layer and held down the Option key while dragging to create a copy of the image on a Cut layer.

I locked the Engrave layer and used Pathfinder > Unite to find the outside and then Offset Path to make a larger outline. This is the same method I would use to create cutout stickers using the Cricut though I think their proprietary software may do this as well. I exported the Engrave and Cut layers separately to avoid any duplication of lines and had a quick takeaway done in an hour or so!