Well, today is the first Sunday of Advent… time to play around with my cutting machine. 😉

I got inspired by a post on Hackaday.com (on Laser-cut Gift Boxes). The post presents a really nice source for DXF files for various shapes for card stock boxes. Out of curiosity I simply ‘threw’ some of their design files at my electronic cutting machine. They might save me some time (gift wrap, you know). The result is a short video of the process, nothing special:

The software of my electronic cutting machine (a Silhouette Portrait) is able to process DXF files as I’ve already used this format before. I’m exporting my solder paste stencils as DXF files and let them cut on mylar sheets. Inkscape, my favorite vector graphics editing tool, is able to import and export all kinds of formats including DXF. And the internet is full of SVG formatted vector graphics as a source for all kinds of patterns.

Most of the provided card stock designs need some modification before being imported into Silhouette Studio, the software that comes with the plotter. In this particular case I had to remove the yellow lines as Silhouette Studio is unable to differ between the (here) yellow bending and the red cutting lines. (Next time I’ll try to convert them into dashed lines as they could made folding easier.) Also there were some errors possibly due to import/export issues I had to fix (highlighted in the screenshot). Besides that the file was smoothly imported into Silhouette Studio and after resizing I got nice gift boxes.

Well… I still have to improve my folding technique of the Happy Meal Box (actually a failed attempt because I forgot to fix to two lines in my first approach). But the petal boxes have really become very beautiful.