Halloween Candle Box

If you just want to build this design, you can download the xcs file for the M1. You should use the blueish light grip cutting mat. Stick this on the bottom of the M1 and place a piece of 160g paper on it. Apply a little bit of presure, so the paper sticks on the mat. In XCS, open the provided xcs design file, select all components (ctrl+a) and move them to the paper that you see on the camera picture from the M1. Select Process and then start. Repeat this with multiple paper colors - each color will take approximately 5 minutes for cutting. Then be carefull to remove the paper parts from the cutting mat. I first glued the pumpkins to the part that will become the box and afterwards glued this together. This way it is easier to adjust the pumpkins with the holes in the box. So now be creative and try different colors and materials! Leave a comment what you used and if you liked it.

And if you want to dive in a little further, here is a very short guide how I did the design. I started with a picture from pixabay (https://pixabay.com/vectors/pumpkins-grimaces-halloween-fall-1777667/), which is free to use, even for commercial purposes. Unfortunately these pumpkins feature a few vertical lines that would cut out paper pumpkin appart. So I used photshop to remove those lines. This can also be done with any pixel graphics program even the Paint-Software which is included in Windows will do the job. Then I reduced everthing to two colors - orange for the foreground, black for the background.

Once you have your picture this way, you can import in into Adobe Illustrator or any other vector garphics program which can vectorize bitmaps. A bitmap is a collection of pixels, but we need the outline of the pumpkin. Illustrator has got a vectorize function. You can play a little bit with the algorithm that is used, but for this design "3 colours" worked best. Now accept the result. Then select the generated object, This is a group of polygons, so ungroup this. You can now delete the background. You should now have left four pumpkins in orange and for sets of faces in black. The orange pumpkins have feature the holes for eyes, mouth and nose.

Now we have our design ready. It is time to draw the box by using the rectangle feature. Draw one box that is the size of four sides plus 1 cm. The draw some dashed lines and place them where you want to fold the design. Note that I had quite a few problem with lines that have the sttribute dashed line. XCS will sometimes just cut those. So I have drawn my dashed lines by myself. If you want to be precise, you should us the position dialog in the top status bar and calculate the positions of the lines.

Now select a pumpkin and the face components associated with it. Scale this to the right size. Now select only the face parts and move them to one of the sides,. Select "outline black 1 pt" and "no filling colour" for this. Now you should see only the lines of the face parts. Move the remaining orange vector pumpkin to somewhere outside the box. Ensure that thjis is also only outline and not filled. Filled objects are exported twice by DXF - outline and inside - so xcs might cut thes openings twice,

So I hope that you can enjoy this a little bit. Feel free to leave a comment.