3D Name badges with your name in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Basswood with acrylic inserts.
Okay, so the first step is getting your name put into hieroglyphics. That's easy, browse to https://www.penn.museum/cgi/hieroglyphsreal.php where you can type in a name and you get a lovely image of your name in hieroglyphs inside a cartouche (the oval frame used in Ancient Egypt for names, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartouche. Designs of the oval vary, some have the thing at the base, some don't. Anyway, I've taken the Penn Museum design and have already put layers in the XCS file so that it will make the frame by etching out wood where there isn't the oval. So all you have to worry about is the symbols inside.
Once you have your name in symbols, use a screen capture tool like Windows Snipping Tool to grab the image from the Penn Museum site, then you trace the design to get the symbols into XCS. I already did the work of the outline, you only have to get the inside symbols for your name.
this will take about 5 of the 40 minutes estimated for the project.
This work is done on Canvas #2.
After tracing the internal Egyptian symbols, take the outer bounds and set those for cutting (80% power, 13mm/sec on my P2S), and take any internal bits like the eye and wing of the bird and set those for scoring (10% power, 200mm/sec). You'll want to group and scale this part of the design (canvas2) to nicely fit inside the wood part on canvas1. When you have it as you like it, cut/score the acrylic. I usually leave the paper on for cutting and remove it with tweezers afterwards.
Once you have the acrylic cuts scaled to fit, you must copy/paste them from Canvas 2 to Canvas 1, and align them inside one of the wood cartouchce areas. After the copy/paste, you must ensure that
On Canvas 1 there are two blue designs with different ovals, that already have the symbols for my wife's name (Pat) in place. There's also an orange design that has no symbols if you want to make a blank one to paint. the idea is that since you cut the acrylic with the exact same symbols that are on the second pass of etching into the wood, the acrylic pieces will drop right in and snugly fit, requiring only a tiny bit of adhesive to stay in place. But since the engraved holes for the acrylic are only about 0.5mm deep, the 3mm acrylic pieces will pop out and have depth. I used black acrylic because it was handy, other colors would be fun, especially if you also paint the inside of the oval.
If you put masking tape/painter's tape on the wood before cutting the oval stays nice and bright, increasing contrast. See photo.
the wood cutting only takes about 7 minutes, rest of the time is for removing tape and gluing in the acrylic bits.