I saw someone at the space post about etching slate coasters using the laser cutter, and I thought, "Hey! That's a super cool idea. I should do that!"

So, I started looking around for blank slate coasters. I found some locally, but the price was *way* high. After a lot of searching, I found a guy on Ebay selling them for around $6 per set of 4, but I had to buy a case. Thinking that this would be a thing that I could resell, I went ahead and bought them.

I had no real guidance, but after taking the Laser cutter intro class, I had a clue as to how to go about it -- I'd need vector images that I could resize seamlessly so they'd fit.

Google was my friend, here, and with only a little effort, I was able to find what I was looking for: free vector silhouette images. As an aside - nearly all of the free image locations had sneaky redirect links to paid sites like istockphoto and shutterstock.

With my images located, I just followed the instructions from the Laser Cutter Intro class. (protip: KEEP THE HANDOUT THEY GIVE YOU!)

One thing that kept catching me out, though, was that someone had turned on "Auto Z", so after I'd set the Z (which is the distance from the laser to the item being etched) and hit go, the table would move! It took a while to find that setting (it's on the "Settings" tab of the print driver)

Each image took about 5 minutes to burn, and I did both front and back. 8 images, x 5 minutes == 40 minutes of cutter time