Wood.

Went and spoke to Matt, down in the woodwork department today. I wanted to book the laser cutter for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of next week, but also to ask him a few questions, we spoke for a while, about what kinds of wood are good to make jewelry from and where to get it from. He said I could use various off-cuts which they had already, as my jewelry pieces would be small, and I think we came to the decision that I'm going to try different kinds of wood. I'm going in on Monday to prepare the wood, I need to get it to the thickness I want and sand it all down.

From speaking to Matt, I've chosen to use a thickness of 4mm, as any thinner and the wood may warp with the heat when the laser cutter is on it - any thicker and it will be a hefty brooch, where as I want them to be elegant and light! As I'm using off-cuts aswell, its free, what a bargain, 0 spent on materials!

It seems at the moment I will just need to pay for the brooch backs which I will buy on Monday from the Merrion art market.

From artists I've been looking at, that use wood in their work, I want to rasterise (when the laser kind of scratches away at the surface in straight lines), some bits of the image. This means I need to produce 2 laser cutting files, one saved as a jpeg and one as paths, Matt explained how to do it, and said it's very important that both images are the same size, so they allign properly when cutting.