Laser Project

For this project, we were told to make a sculpture using the laser cutter.  To do this we had to create an image using Adobe Illustrator.  The image I created on Adobe Illustrator is made up of lines using the arches tool.  All of these arched lines were placed randomly and connected to each other at their ends.  I am unable to upload the image but you can see part of it in the end result.  My original idea was to make a sculpture that hung close to a wall with a light behind it. 

I chose to fabric to use on the laser cutter because I knew I wanted to sculpture to be flexible and lightweight. I bought canvas from Hancock Fabrics because it  seemed thick enough to etch an image into. To fit the space in the laser cutter, I had to cut the fabric and the image into four sections.  After etching the image onto the fabric, I connected the four panels back together by ironing them on to interfacing.  I chose to use interfacing rather than sewing the pieces together because I wanted the image to be as flat as possible and the lines to match up.

After I had to pieces together I wanted to take advantage of the flexibility of the fabric and the lights that were already in the room and decided to make a sculpture that could hang from the lights.  The plan was to use grommets, to put sturdy holes in the fabric, dowel rods that I would put through the holes to hold the fabric spread out enough so that the image could be seen, and string to tie to the rods and hang from the lights.  When I was ready to hang the sculpture I decided not to use the string but put the dowel rods over the lights and use them to hang the fabric as well.