Half Cut & Engraved Text on Polaroid Frame

1. Write your Text and make it editible by using Object → Convert
2. Transform your text the way you like.
3. Select all and use pathfinder to combine all parts to one piece

• Create your Polaroid in desired size. Keep a duplicate of the inner rectagle.
• Place your text inside the polaroid frame the way you like
• Paste the prevoius mentioned rectangle in same place 
• Select rectangle & yout Text and use Pathfinder → divide area (translated, it's the left one in the bottome row)
• Ungroup all and clean up all pieces that you only left with a clean text thats cutted in a way

1. Select the top part that should be added to the frame and the frame itself to combine with pathfinder.

Now you should left with one single piece thats the frame with the upper part and one piece of the lower part.

Now you only need to save the file as supported format like svg and import to XCS.

1. Write your Text, here it's important to know if you want to make fun ways or want to make letterspacing lower you should write all letters on it's own to easily do it
   For example it's not possible to only weld 1 single letter so I wrote the one I wanted “B” space “o”
2. Select all and weld, make changes to the look you want
   If we focus on mine I selected the “B o” and clicked edit node to get rid of the “o”. I repeated that for the “th” of 25th and the "i" to connect the i dot to the letter as this isnt working like I thought wehen overlaping in nodes mode and used unite feauture. 

Here it shows thats best to have no letterspacing to make it possible to cut

1. duplicate you text design and place in same y-height next to the first one
2. create a rectangle thats the bigger width and half height (or the height you want a cut) starting on the top
3. Go to the Applications Tap and use the Grid Array with 2x2 and distance that much that it covers the lower half and your duplicate text.

1. Delete at one Text side the lower rectangle and at the duplicate the upper one
2. Select the first pieces and use substract mode to get rid of the half
3. Repeat for the other one

1. Select the lower piece and change settings to engrave. This also helps for alignment and gives a better view for how it's meant.
2. Now place both text like its one piece, for this I turned on the auto snapping to help staying in the same y-position. Thats also possible by using the fields on the right side, do it like it's easier for you.
3. After that you can place the cut text into the frame you want aligning that the cut touches the frame inner edge.

1. Only select the upper part and your frame and again use combine to turn this all into a cut line

Now you can go on and let the laser do it's work!

Mentioned before we have RED = Cut and Green = Engrave inside my file.

Please make a small test before running the whole piece!

After getting the frame out of the Laser you can glue a photo onto the backside or turn it into a frame where you can change photos after time. There are many possibilities!

I hope this was understandable even it's a very long How to. If you have questions feel free to ask, I help as much as I can! ~ Anzy