Strawberry Earrings

Since I've already done the pineapple and watermelon earrings, of course, following my method with those earrings, I started with the traditional strawberry (Photo 1), then the curvy abstract one (Photo 2) is added. Of course my typically process is to sketch out my idea with Procreate App on iPad, that give my a good visual of what  my final deisgn is going to look like.

The first step is to create the basic, so I upload my sketch to Silhouette Studio and did the image Trace to convert them to vector format first.

With some minor tweaks and edits, I came up with the following:

1, The traditional strawberry, with seeds cut out

2. Another traditional one, instead of the traditional seeds, I'm going to use diamond painting beads for the seed.

3. This is going to be with the curvy abstract patterns

Sometimes your idea worked the very first time, sometimes, you found a better solution during the process. I tested out my first version of the strawberry, it works, but I decide to add a Fun in the Sun version as well, I want add some motif at the very bottom piece, and after few tries, I decide to add a strawberry flower, so I found some strawberry images, one is for the flower (Photo 1) and one is for the leaf  (Photo 2).

So I did the same, with image Tracing feature, I convert them to vector format, and modified, and simplified the images, also see Photo 1 and Photo 2.

And I also decided to use the flower motif for the stud portion of the earring (see Photo 3) as well, so now we have the Fun in the Sun Strawberry (see Photo 4)

We then export the design to SVG format and it is ready for the laser cutting.

Cutting is very straightforward, load the material which is 1.5mm basswood in my case, open the xTool Create Space, connect to my M1, turn on air assist and purifier, then upload the SVG file I created (Photo 1). Set the setting which is 100/4/1 for the cut, then process. See the result in Photo 2.

For small piece project like this, I like to use acrylic paint pen, it is a lot easier to do. I also use a piece masking tape sticky side up on my work surface, so I can stick the pieces on it, keep the small pieces from moving around, this makes the painting a lot easier.

After the paint is dried, go ahead glue all the small pieces together to create the strawberry and the flower. 

Again I use the large jumper ring for the strawberry and the flower stud, a smaller jumper ring in between to add some movements for the earrings.