Engraved gift lids for Mason jars
Instruction
Wooden mason jar lid inserts for Christmas gifting. These fit over the food-grade lid but fit snugly enough to still use the safety ring, allowing for uniquely personalized gifts of home-made preserves, jelllies, jam, drink mixes or other food. Two sizes fit the different jar sizes.
The design has multiple circles used for alignment and cutting:
- The black circle is the cutout of the lid.
- The red circle is for alignment only, to fit your images/text. The red circle is never processed (not cut, not scored, not engraved.)
- The blue circle is for cutting a shoulder into the back of the wood circle.
Select the bitmap design and whatever text you want, and align to the red circle in the design. Set the output selections so that you are processing the bitmap, the text, and the outermost diameter (black layer) only. Process this. Should take around 5-10 minutes.
Do not move or adjust the piece within the machine!
Open the P2 and you should see the engraved items as in the first picture. Using a piece of tape, carefully lift the circles out without moving the main piece in any way.
Flip the cut circles out to prepare for pass 2, where you'll cut the shoulder on the back side that makes it fit nice.
After flipping the pieces over, you then change the output settings in the project so that the text, the image and the cut for the diameter are disabled for output.
Instead, you now select the blue compound vectors that were previously disabled, and you enable them to be processed, and run again. This will cut a shoulder into the bottoms of the pieces so that they fit nice into the lids of the mason jars, as shown in the second picture.
Remove the pieces from the laser cutter. Use a piece of sandpaper (I use 150 grit) and buff the top side to remove any excess markings from the engraving. If you prefer to put tape over the top instead, that's fine, but note that with complex bitmaps removing tape bits can be a real pain.
On the bottom, go over the shoulder area a few times with a wire brush to remove the rough, loose bits of carbonized wood. the attached photo shows the difference, the smaller lid has not yet been cleaned, the larger lid has been cleaned.
The bitmap I used for the file was found with a Google search, please ensure you check licensing and attribution rights for any image you use. You can also change the “To:” and “From:” from engraving to scoring if you like. As provided it's generic so that you can write the names on the lid after production, but of course you could have the laser put the names in too.
If you have used tape to mask the top when engraving, then you're also in a perfect position to use some paint to fill in the bitmap or the names with some paint. Very quickly painted example attached (not good enough for gifting, just to give the idea, I'm terrible at painting).