One essential piece of this project is the PATTERNPLY® PASTEL STAINED GLASS on CLEAR FLEX from Smoky Hill Designs. Search under PatternPly for any of the stained glass patterns.
The material is is a semi transparent acrylic sheet which is only .01 inch thick. And yes, the diode laser will cut it just fine. Although the darker and more complete the particular pattern is, the easier the cutting will be.

You will also need some white LED strips. You can find them on Amazon for under $5. You do not need any of the multi color products, just simple white will do. Look for 60 LEDs per meter. That puts three lights in a two inch segment. 

We will need a couple of feet (half meter) of a thin stranded wire in two colors. I used what I had available, a 22 gauge white and a 22 gauge red. By convention, if you use black, it will be negative power, and if you use red it will be positive power. (And green is Always ground. In this project we do not actually have a ground, so do not use green.) Almost any thin wire will work, but stranded wire is easier to work with than solid wire.

In addition, you will need four tiny brass wood screws. Size #2 by 3/8 inch will work fine. A very small drill bit to pre-drill pilot holes is helpful, a 1/8" bit to countersink the front panel is also helpful. 

You will need some good quality double stick tape, or a hot melt glue (hot glue gun.) I like the ½" wide clear VHB tape from 3M. This is to stick the LED strips in place. The adhesive which may be on the back of the strip is worthless. To the point that I usually just peel it off.

You will need one 5.5mm x 2.1mm DC Power Supply Panel Mount Jack available on Amazon. Just make sure it is Panel Mount, and that it fits in an 8mm hole. You may get lucky enough to find some with wires already attached. 

You will also need a wall transformer, the type some refer to as a “wall-wart.” !2v transformers are really common, personally I prefer a 9v if available. The LED strip will light with anything from 6v to 15v. The power connector on it should be 2.1mm male to match up with the female jack that we will install in the cross.

Since the flex acrylic is the most tricky, I will start there. There is both a Cross Art acrylic SVG file and a Cross Art acrylic XCS file. As usual, red lines denote a cut, blue lines denote a score, and purple are generally informative in nature.
To ensure a good clean cut, I apply regular masking tape to the shiny side of the acrylic where the cuts will be. I then cut (10W settings) at 100%, 10 mm/sec, 4 passes.

The same file can optionally be used to cut a white paper or vellum sheet to go behind the acrylic in order to defuse the LED lights.

Next I cut the back from a 12 x 12 inch sheet of 1/8 MDF. My 10W settings for cutting MDF are 100%, 3 mm/sec, 1 pass. Notice the file for the back is a bit unusual. It has the back piece, but there is another cut 3 mm outside the perimeter of the back piece. If you cut that out as well, the “scrap” piece makes a great aid in aligning and glueing the side pieces.

The file for the side pieces is called Cross Art frame as either SVG or XCS. Both versions have letters which label each of the individual pieces. ‘A’ is the top of the cross and the letters increment in a clockwise fashion around the cross. The letters are not intended to be etched onto the actual side pieces themselves. If you print the SVG file, it makes a handy reference for assembling the cross. The side pieces I cut from 3mm Walnut plywood. All the pieces will fit on an A4 sheet (8 by 12 inch.) My settings for 3mm walnut ply are 100%, 4 mm/sec, 1 pass.

Finally the front piece. There are several options for the front of the cross. This project is presented with a descending dove in the middle of the cross. There is also a empty cross which you can add to whatever you wish, or there is a smaller cross suspended in the center of the main cross. That last file is not my work other than some modifications. I do not recall where I found the file initially.

Last but not least, we need to cut the LED light strip into three 2 inch pieces, and one 6 inch piece. Cut the LED strip with scissors by the way.  You will notice that every two inches there are two oblong copper contacts. The LED strip can be cut at those contacts--right in the center of them. You want to leave a little of the exposed copper contacts on each side of the cut. Those contacts are what we will be soldering our wires to.

You will want to do this step on a flat workspace with some protective covering over it. the glue we use in this step will get on whatever is underneath the cross as we build it. A reasonably smooth piece of cardboard will do just fine.

Assembling the sides is fairly quick and easy if you did save the ‘scrap’ when you cut the back panel of the cross. That scrap is cut large enough to fit the entire assembled cross into. Simply place the back panel in the cutout of the scrap piece and then start adding the side pieces. Refer back to the SVG image in the ZIP file. The letter designations tell you the order that the side pieces should be placed. ‘A’ is top center, the remaining pieces are placed in alphabetical order in a clockwise fashion. Using regular wood glue, glue the side pieces to the back/bottom of the cross, and to each other but not to the outer frame. Clamp if necessary Allow to dry. At some point when partially dry, pick up the cross to make sure all of the pieces are secure, and that the cross does not stick to the worktable. 

Once the sides are all in place, you should have four small almost square pieces remaining. Glue one of each of those to the inside middle of the end piece for each arm of the cross, including top and bottom. Those are to give our wood screws something to bite into. 

Thirty minutes or so after you glue the four tabs into place, you can paint the inside of the cross white, which will improve the quality of the lighting. 

Get your soldering iron nice and hot, we are about to do some soldering! I am going to go into a lot of detail here so if you already know how to solder, skip past the first half of this step. I will add a divider line at that point.

For basic electrical soldering, you will need a good soldering iron with a pretty sharp point at the tip. A small wedge tip is also okay, but those big wedges are not for this type of work. You want a tip about 1/16 to 1/8 inch wide. You will also need flux core solder, the pretty thin stuff is easier to work with, like 0.8 or 1.0 mm.

The iron will reach temperatures of 250°F to 300°F or more, so do not attempt this unless you can focus on this task without distraction.

Cut your wire into seven pieces of each color about 3 inches long, and one of each color about 5 inches long. Each end of each wire will need to be stripped of insulation for ⅛ to ¼ inch and tinned with solder. To tin a wire, first, be sure the strands of a stranded wire are twisted together then briefly touch the tip of soldering iron to the wire and touch the solder to the same point. You should immediately see the solder melt and flow up the strands of wire. That is all you need. Do that for both ends of each wire that you cut. 

Now lay the LED strips that you cut on a flat surface. Very briefly touch the tip of the soldering iron to one of the copper contacts and immediately touch the solder to the same contact. A small bump of solder should now be stuck onto the copper contact. Do the same for both contacts at each end of each LED segment. That is the equivalent of tinning the wires, but instead of wire, we tinned the LED strips. You do not need to tin the contacts which are not at the very end of the LED strip.

Now for the tricky part. The barrel connector. That is where the transformer plug fits into our display to power the LED lights. Most low voltage wall transformers have a 2.1 mm connector, but 2.5 mm is not uncommon. they are not interchangeable. We will use a 5.5 (length of the barrel plug) by 2.1 (diameter of the jack pin) connector. You will need to solder two of the wires you cut to the tabs on the back of the jack housing. The short tab is connected to the pin, the long tab to the barrel. So solder the positive wire to the short tab and the negative wire to the long tab. To do that, since your wires are already tinned, simply bend the end of the exposed, tinned wire over or through the tab and crimp with pliers. Then heat with the soldering iron just long enough to melt the solder. When you see it flow, you are done. Do not overheat.

Our more experienced readers should pick up here.

Using the double sided tape or hot glue, arrange the four LED strip segments in the cross. The prefered placement is in the in the middle of each branch of the cross. Obviously the longer piece in the bottom branch. Please refer to the picture for proper placement.

The LED strips require power between 6 and 12 volts DC. Lower voltage will result in a more subdued lighting The contacts on each side are connected together along the edge of the strip, which means you can feed the power from one to another, and use either end to do so. Once you apply power to any set of contacts, the entire strip is energized. If you look closely at the LED strip, each section between contacts has one small resistor off to one side. That side is negative, the other side is positive. The LEDs will not light if the power is reversed.

The first thing you want to do is countersink the holes in the front panel. For the #2 flat head wood screws, a 5/32" bit worked well for me. Just press it to the lasered hole twist the drill bit with your fingers. Don't remove to much wood, you just want a dimple for the screw head to sit in.

Adding a vellum layer below the acrylic is optional, but it is suggested. The same file used to cut the acrylic will work, The 10W settings for vellum are 50%, 10 mm/sec, 1 pass. A couple drops of glue on the edge will hold it in place. 

I used a tiny drill bit to drill pilot holes in the frame for the #2 x 3/8 wood screws that hold the front in place. I have no idea what size the bit is that I used, but it is extremely small. Doing so, is helpful, yes, but the wood screws will make their own holes if you do not have such a bit.

The wood front panel, the acrylic, and the vellum all have tiny holes where the screws go. If you insert the screws into and through the front, they will line up with the holes in the other layers which makes getting everything in place somewhat easier.

Basically, place the vellum if you have it, then the acrylic, then the wood front panel of your choice. Then screw it down with your four wood screws. Plug in your transformer and enjoy!