Grad Picture Frames
I graduated! And created a few picture frames to commemorate the occasion for myself and some friends. These took 7 days to make, probably 15–20 hrs total, with half that time spent in the makerspace with the laser cutter.
Idea
I’ve had the picture frame idea for a while (since I got easy access to a laser cutter), so I was really looking for a reason to implement it. Coming up with designs for the photo frames was much harder than I expected, probably because of the anxiety that comes from gifting things I’ve made. A lot of googling for custom laser cut photo frame ideas was involved.
Some design goals:
- Sentimental and reminiscent of 4 happy years in college. Ideally with inside jokes or personal touches
- Not so sentimental that they’re “cringe.” Should be polished and ideally professional-looking — displayable in a shared home/at an office desk
- Lots of graduation photo frames have people’s names large on the front, but I thought that was strange? And so, they had to be personal without directly saying their names
- Format should fit the friendship. This contributed more toward photo choice, but photo choice also informed frame design (what parts of the photos are important, or display of multiple photos)
Design
First attempt: Colored animal frame
I started with this one because it seemed the simplest.
I drew out the animal designs I wanted, and brought them into the laser cutter software after thresholding the images/cleaning them up.
For the frame itself, I took a template off the internet to start (https://youtu.be/ABNlvS1xsJQ). One issue was the frame border was too large. The stock material I was using was 12"x12"x1/8" wood, and to minimize costs I wanted 1 frame per sheet. The template’s frame border was so large that I needed 2 per.
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Another issue was that the frames are made of 3 pieces of layered wood, and the middle piece is a big blocky C-cutout. Again, it wouldn’t all fit on one piece of stock material, so I separated the C piece into 3 sticks.
I kept the template’s stand, but modified the template frame in the laser cutter software. Fun note— Carnegie Mellon definitely has official fonts, but I just used whatever font looked somewhat similar from the laser cutter software because I was so tired of the software at that point. My bad.
Second attempt: 6 identical frames
Designing within the laser cutter software was not fun — it was limited, and I had to sit on the specific makerspace computer the whole time.
I tried to use Inkscape to design the next frames, and redesigned the frames with decreased border size, but THEN there was an issue with exporting the svg where the text would get messed up. To fix the text issue, I brought the svgs into photopea.com (free Photoshop) and redid the text. THEN the text was super pixelated if exported as an svg, but it worked fine as a png! Go figure.
Third attempt: Collage frame
Smooth sailing now! Photopea worked well.
Fabrication
Cutting went well! Some notes:
- The machine cuts with varying power at various coordinates, and would cut through in some areas but not others, so checking after cutting is necessary
- Order of cutting/engraving mattered for the set of 6 frames so that burn marks didn’t show on the engraved section (visible in the 1st photo:/ )
- I couldn’t figure out the relationship between how dark the wood gets with engraving vs power/how deep the engraving is. This made the 6 supposedly identical frames a little weirdly different.
- I had the photos printed as I was cutting, so right after a frame was cut I could check the photos fit
After cutting, I hand-sanded each part to remove the burn marks and super-glued them. Most frames had 5 parts + small decorative extras (+ 2 stand parts, unglued). I painted the decorations with paint pens!
After gluing, the edges were so uneven I felt obligated to use a belt sander on the frames’ perimeters. (The ordering in the process here was a mistake — I should’ve glued decorations on only after belt sanding). I also wanted compressed air to get rid of sawdust, but didn’t have any:/
Finishing
I ran out to buy clear spray-on lacquer from Home Depot and lacquered all the frames outside, then did a finishing sanding. Lacquering and belt-sanding weren’t part of the original plan, but I was getting carried away with this project and I guess I really thought it would be significantly weirder to display a bare wooden picture frame than a finished-feeling/looking one.
Thanks to my sister for helping out here! It involved lots of standing vigilant and blowing leaves off the parts as they dried. Also, spraying evenly is difficult.
And that’s it! I thoroughly enjoyed this project, and will miss my laser cutter access post-college.
Next time, I’d be curious about using wood stain! Not sure how it’d affect wood engravings but it would probably vastly improve the overall look. Compressed air for the wood dust would’ve been nice too.
