A Note About Laser Cutters
While making stuff in the workshop, we follow the acronym ATGATT – All The Gear All The Time. It means you should always wear your PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). I admit, there are times where we have shirked our duty on safety measures in the workshop – not wearing a rebreather while grinding, not running the vent fan while working with contact cement, not wearing gloves while working with CA glue… HOWEVER – NEVER EVER EVER use any laser device without your PPE. Most laser cutters are class 4 laser products. This means that even looking at the interface point (where the laser hits the material) without wearing the proper safety glasses can cause permanent damage to your vision. Most cutters come with safety glasses that are designed to block the specific frequencies output by the laser module. ALWAYS WEAR THEM WHEN THE LASER IS ACTIVE. ALWAYS!
This is Halloween!!!
As some of you know, we help out with a small neighborhood haunt that runs the last weekend of October and Halloween night. As it’s the season, we are making props and costumes for the haunt. Bernie needs a new hat, which we are going to make out of 5mm EVA foam. Also, Rilla is going to be the victim of a knife thrower with almost no skill. So we need 6 knives to bury in her costume and one for the thrower to hold. All of these will be made from 10mm EVA and shaped on the grinder, or with a rotary tool.
These two projects use many of the same techniques, but also have their own challenges. So I figured that I’d write up a tutorial for them both.
Side Note: Since the daggers are going to be produced at the scale they need to be cut, they can be printed and used as a pattern for hand cutting the foam as well.
What you will need
1. Your pattern – In this case, the magician’s hat and throwing daggers
2. A virtual printer that allows you to print to files
3. An images processing application like Photoshop or Krita to merge your images
4. Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator or other vector application
5. LaserGRBL or Lightburn for actually controlling your laser cutter
6. A laser cutter – duh!
Printing your pattern
Remember how we went through how to scale patterns in this tutorial? We are going to be doing the same thing here, except with a virtual printer.
I hear you asking, “Hey, Feral! What’s a virtual printer?” A virtual printer is an application that acts as a printer, but allows you to “print” your pages as images. So, we will be piecing multiple images together instead of printed pages. PDFill has a great one. It’s a little older, but it does what we need it to do. Head over here and install it. Let me know when you are done.
Oh, good! You’re back!
Now, we are going to scale and print it as we did in the tutorial.
All of this seems familiar, right? Good.
Before you hit enter, select PDFill PDF&Image writer from the printer menu.
When you hit enter, it is going to ask you where you would like to save your pages. Put them somewhere you will remember.
Now it is time to open your image editor of choice. I am using Photoshop, so my instructions will be using it, but the process is pretty much identical in all of them.
We start by opening the first image. Currently, in my workflow, this file is called hat1. The first step is to make a new layer.
Now, unlock the image we just opened.
Drag the new layer below the image we originally opened.
When it printed out, it showed that the pages were printed as a 2 x 2 grid. So I am going to increase the Canvas size to reflect this. 200% vertical, 200% horizontal (see below).
Drag the second image onto this document. When it drops in, click the checkmark and set the Blending Mode to Multiply.
Next, we are going to zoom into the top of the document, near the center where the cut marks are (see below).
Use the Move tool to align these cut marks so they look like this:
Then we are going to merge these two layers and drag the next two images in. I am pretty sure you know what to do – set the Blending Mode to Multiply, align the 3rd and 4th pages just like we did the first two, and then merge those two layers.
Now, your layers SHOULD look like this:
Because we are aligning these images into one, we are going to have to change the Blending Mode to Multiply again. Now zoom into the middle of the image. You should see something like this:
We are going to use the Move tool again to align those cut marks. Once we have that done, we want to flatten the image. And you should have something that looks like this:
For this to work, we will need to use the Brush tool to cover all of the stuff OUTSIDE the pattern. It will look like this when you are done:
Then we are going to use the Magic Wand tool and click anywhere outside of the pattern. Go to the Select menu and hit Inverse. You should see the “crawling ants” around the pattern pieces.
With this selection active, make a new layer. Then go to the Edit menu and select Stroke. Using this technique, I typically use these settings, but you may have to play around with it.
You should now have two layers, each one for a different part of what we are doing. We need to export them separately. So, click the little eye by your top layer to hide it. Then export what you have as a PNG (LightBurn likes PNG for engraving).
Name it something like HAT-Engrave.
Hide the Engraving layer and make the Stroke layer visible. Then we export that as an SVG (you will have to enable legacy export in preferences.
Name it something like HAT-Path.
Enter the Inkscape
Now, we move into Inkscape. Inkscape (available here) is a freeware, open source application that does many of the same things as Adobe Illustrator. We are going to use Inkscape to create a vector for our laser cutter.
A vector file is a type of digital graphic that uses mathematical formulas to define shapes, lines, and curves instead of pixels. This means the image can be scaled up or down infinitely without losing clarity or becoming blurry. Common formats include .SVG, .AI, and .EPS, and they are often used for logos, illustrations, and designs that need to maintain sharpness at any size.
Laser cutters and engravers rely on vector files to guide the laser’s path with precision. Instead of interpreting an image as dots or pixels, the machine reads the vector lines as exact coordinates to follow. This allows the laser to cut or engrave clean, continuous paths—making vectors essential for creating accurate shapes, smooth curves, and detailed designs in materials.
We are going to open our SVG in Inkscape and your options should look like this:
Hit Okay, and our SVG is open in Inkscape.
SIDE NOTE ABOUT VECTOR FILES: Vector files and raster files are different ways of handling visual information. Raster files are what most people are used to dealing with. The digital photos you take with your phone are raster files. Vector files are a different way to handle this visual information and require a different way of working with them. We’re not going into any depth here, because there is a lot to it. What you need to know is that a vector image is, essentially, a text file that describes lines, points and curves in a way that makes it possible to scale these images up and down with no loss. Laser cutters like these files, so we need to convert our shapes into a vector.
Now that we have our SVG in Inkscape, we need to make it into a vector.
In the upper right hand side of Inkscape, you will see a series of tabs. Click on the one labeled “Layers and Objects.” After you do that, you should see something like this:
See that little triangle by the layer called Image? Click on it, and you should see something that looks like this:
I want you to right click on that layer labeled “Image1”. A context menu will pop up. Click on Trace Bitmap. It’s going to open a new tab set that should look something like this:
You should set the detection mode to “Centerline Tracing (Autotrace)”. Depending on the specific pattern you used, you may have to play with your settings a bit.
This window shows how the vector is going to look once it finishes creating your vector path. When you are happy with what you see, hit Apply at the bottom of the tab window.
Now you have a vector! *insert jaunty fanfare here*
Time to double check our work
If we did everything correctly, we should be ready to export this and load it into LaserGRBL or LightBurn. However, we can’t assume that it went correctly. I have done that and a lot of my results have been… silly.
NOTE: Silly is a term we use here in the studio for things that have been… frustrating. Part of the reason we are making these tutorials is that a lot of the tools we use have a VERY steep learning curve. While figuring out the process of creating laser cut files from PDFs, there were a couple times where Feral was frustrated to the point of tears – literally. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
To check our work, we need to click on the “Layers and Objects” tab again. That is where the rest of our work is going to be.
Now, you should see the vector path we just created. Under that Image twirldown menu, there should be “image1” and our new vector “path1”.
We need to check the vector to make sure that the trace gave us a clean result. To do that, click on “path1” in the Layers and Objects tab. This selects the path layer. Then we need to check the nodes. I could explain nodes in detail, but it’s not really necessary for our purposes. If you want a deeper understanding of nodes and vectors, there are thousands of tutorials out there.
For now, just click on the Node tool.
Things now look a little different. This is the Node view. It lets you look at the nodes in detail to make sure what you see is what you want.
It should look something like this.
With the Node tool active, you need to zoom in and look at your nodes and path.
NOTE: In Inkscape, to zoom in and out hit the +/- keys and the middle mouse button to move the canvas around.
What you are looking for is any irregularities in the path. We want a single set of nodes (which creates a line). If we did everything right, it should look like this:
As you can (hopefully) see, it is a single set of nodes making a line. If it doesn’t look a lot like that, there are a couple options.
OPTION 1: You can go back over to the Layers and Objects tab, click on path1 and delete it. Then click on image1 and redo the bitmap trace, adjusting the settings.
OPTION 2: If it’s just a couple little things, you can use the node tool and delete the extraneous nodes. This WILL change the geometry, so you will have to play around to make it work.
Ideally, it will be perfect on the first try. Sometimes, it just won’t work right and you have to make a lot of adjustments. It’s the nature of the beast. While it seems like a lot of complex work, after you do it a couple of times, it becomes second nature. To give you an idea – before I wrote this tutorial, I ran through it to make sure that my process was as flawless as it could be – that took me about 2 minutes to have it ready for LightBurn.
Now, head back over to the Layers and Objects tab. Click on “image1” and then hit Delete. We don’t need this anymore. It won’t be deleted on your hard drive, so you can always come back and redo stuff, but if we leave it in this file, it will get weird when you import it into LightBurn.
Click on the File menu and select Export. It will launch a new tab window that looks like this:
See that little drop down menu that is currently set to “PNG (*.png)”? Click on that and select “Plain SVG (*.svg)”. Click that little folder and change the name to hat-cut and hit enter. Inkscape is going to save that. In your save folder, you should now have 3 files – Hat-Engrave, Hat-Path and Hat-cut.
That’s all there is to it. You are ready to drop these into your laser cutter’s software. You won’t use the Hat-path file. Align the engrave and cut files, and you are good to go.
Happy crafting!
October 2, 2025
