Christmas Heart Paw Coaster

I pulled across a heart from the shapes panel and rotated it 180 degrees as this is what I wanted for the pad of the paw.  I then went and resized it to 2.5 inches wide.  I went to shapes and grabbed the circle shape and made it into an oval and resized that to 2 inches wide and copy and pasted 3 more.  I put the shapes around the heart shape to sit how I wanted them to look.  Once I had done this I selected them to see the distance apart from each other and the heart they would be, to enable me to move them so they looked more uniform.

I then selected them together again and grouped then combined subtract at overlap. After doing this I went to the outline and outlined the paw at .45 as you will see in the diagram.  I took that outline away as this would be the backing and the cork cutout for the base.  I then went and did another outline then combined the paw with that as this will be the part of the paw I needed.

I wanted to add something a little different in the way of the bar splitting the heart so that we can engrave a name on there. I went into my photoshop programme as I wanted to create a wavy bar.  I selected the rectangle tool and made a decent sized rectangle and then rasterised the image and copied the layer.  Once I had done this I went to effects and used the distort, wavy and played around with the different parametres until I was happy with how it looked.  I then deleted the original rectangle (not sure if that's what you're supposed to do, but it worked for me) and saved it as a .png file.

I imported the wavy rectangle into creative space and traced it then discarded the image and resized to fit into the heart. Once I had this correct I then proceeded to go to the shapes tab and pick out the reindeer, a snowflake and a Christmas bauble and placed each into different areas of the paw (I thought I had screen shots of this but can't seem to find them, my apologies) I realised I needed to add string to the bauble so took the rectangle shape and sized that accordingly.  I selected all objects and united them.

I played around with different fonts and wanted one which was a little bit on the chunky side to sit within the wave frame and did it as an engrave.  Once I placed it within the frame I had to rotate is ever so slightly to the left so that it would sit at the right angle to engrave nicely.  

I selected all objects and resized to 4.5 inches wide which is a nice suitable size for a coaster.  I aligned the backing with the front so that I could get it set up for cutting.

I placed my plywood onto my machine and started setting it up ready for processing.  I framed it to make sure everything was a suitable fit for the plywood.  

Now first initial attempt at this didn't go so well.  I did check the plywood to see the true thickness with my caliper and it was a bit thicker than 3 mm so not everything cut through properly (this is why I wanted to use the 20w) so I decided to do it at 5 passes instead which worked much better.  Once the cutting was done I Engraved the name by going in and reframing over the wavy area.

I ignored the paw with designs in it along with the engraved name and set output for the backing shape.  I  changed the material to cork and upped the power as I have not worked with cork and the initial setting was strong enough and I faced a slight issue which stopped the machine and I went and changed the settings so that it would cut with higher power and hoped for the best, it worked!

I started working out what I wanted to do here, as to whether I wanted to paint it or leave it.  I decided to keep it simple and just use two colours and do a tint varnish as I didn't want to destroy the look of Foxy's name. so being as this is for a man I went with a green background and chose silver for the decoration side of things and decided to varnish the rest of it and then glued the cork to the backing and glued the front part to the backing.

Happy creating everyone and I hope you enjoy making this project for yourself or loved ones.

Happy New Year Everyone, I hope you all have a very prosperous New Year!