For my Mother's Day & Father's Day collection this year, thanks to the new M1 laser, I wanted a combination of an easy-to-make thread heart and a cute engraving. So I came up with this design where I ended up just writing text in the center of the heart.

The only thing that changed a bit is to laser engrave some dots along the heart line to create marks for my nails. If you don't want to create a Stringart then just delete them from the file.

As I used Adobe Illustrator this was very easy by using the contour as dash line with round ends and no lengts and 6mm distance between the dash lines. That converts into evenly distributed points on the heart shape. 

In XCS you need to do this manually, if you want a different symbol.

• As I'm using thicker wood I needed to work with baseplate removed setting inside XCS. 
• I still don't own the riser base with honeycomb so I figured that small little waste cuts are perfect to put under the M1 legs and create a little more height thats enough to get my wood engraved. 
• for secure work I placed the baseplate under the laser to use it as the playground anyway
• As the baseplate is removed please youse safety glasses to protect yourself!

Strinart is easy and hearts are the mostly the first project to try out. So heres a little how-to for beginners:

1. Hammer Nails inside the wood (a bit less than half the nail height into it)
2. Tie a knot a round a nail
3. connect next nails with you yarn, you can do this straight to next one or by making zig zag. But it's easier and quicker by just going around all nails
4. If you like the amount of layers you made, go all the way back to the nail you started
5. Again tie a knot but this time with the strand thats leftover from the beginning.

Thats it!

As always I hope you liked my Idea and have fun to create it on your own! ~Anzy