Visit To Fred Aldous (Laser Cutting)

I arranged a visit to Fred Aldous in Manchester for myself and Laura. We wanted to understand how the machine worked and how to prepare our designs to be sent to the laser cutter. We hadn't prepared any files to use but when i explained to Elle about this she said it's fine and that she would go through this with us to understand how to do it, as well as giving us our introduction to using the machine and health and safety.
This vis was really worth it as i feel more confident in drawing a design to then be scanned in, re drawn on illustrator and then sent to the laser cutter. We did try one of my doily designs to see if it would work by live tracing the artwork on illustrator, but when it traced it made more then one line around each shape.  Elle said that for sampling it would be ok, but it would mean that the laser would keep going over the different lines until it had completed them all which will make your design thiner. So it is really important to re create the shapes in illustrator so that that it gives you only one line and it would be a smooth finished line, rather then a jagged edge which wouldn't look good.

Here is examples of the process.

This is a page from my sketchbook, on it is the design in the centre that i used to live trace. Below is the cut version. also the offcuts are placed on my sketchbook page. When i placed the offcuts together they also formed a nice new shape which i could use for another design.