 We do a lot of craft shows and what do you think we found to be the best seller? What is up? A welcome back. Do you like to do a builder or make it? So do we and we have new videos each week. Our door hangers are great and they sell great at the craft shows. They are a high quality product but you know what would be the cherry on top is some personalization. We found at the craft shows that the items that we see walking by or the booze that we see with frequent customers besides our own are those with personalization. We really want to add that personalized touch to our door hangers. But neither one of us have that art of calligraphy down so that is not an option. So today we're going to show you how to make some money-making monograms using only x-tool creative space and the new s1 40 watt diode laser. Now the question of this video is can we do this fast enough inefficiently enough to be able to do this at the craft show? So we're going to be keeping some clocks, keeping some time and see if we can replicate this process at the show on site. Tim's got her stopwatch ready. Step one we're going to create a design using only x-tool creative space. No other design software. Here we are in creative space. X-Tool creative space is X-Tools free design software. This software is a program that you'll download. You can use this without internet access. It will connect directly to your machine. And this one instance connects to all of our x-tool machines. We don't need separate instances of the software. And we're going to start with our text and we click on the little text little box pops up in the middle. But you actually enter your text over here on the right hand side. So we're going to start with an M. We already know that we want this to be Times New Roman. This is going to be our split monogram piece. Now it does have some x-tool type faces but then it does get into your system type faces. So any fonts you have you can use inside the tool. Let's stretch this guy out. Let's start by making him 8.5. And we want bold. Oh that's right let's bold this guy. All right now let's draw a box. Insert a rectangle. We're going to make in a box about an inch high or an inch and a half high right across the middle. Right about there. We're going to grab both. We're going to come up to combine but we're not going to combine them that we're going to subtract. So it subtracts that top layer from the bottom layer. Now I got a couple of different pieces here. We're going to put it in another rectangle up in here. I'm going to make this rectangle. I'm going to unclick this little. We're going to unlock this little lock here which locks our aspect ratio. Thanks Kim. We're going to make this 12 inches wide about a little less than a quarter inch tall. I'm going to CTRL C, CTRL V to duplicate that. Drag this one down. Let's go ahead and make sure everything is aligned horizontal. I'm going to zoom in. I'm going to make sure these boxes here, these rectangles, just barely touch. I'm going to have to think we're all in. Grab everything, go back up to combine and we're actually going to combine everything with UNITE. Now I have two pieces. Zoom back out. Yeah. Do you want to fill those so that we can kind of see what that's going to look like? Yeah. It's kind of hard to see. There you go. Yeah. But this middle piece is too skinny and I'm unable to ungroup them. So we're going to draw another rectangle. I'm just going to grab both copy paste, drag one of these over here. Move this box down. Now what you're trying to do here is create the top piece of the bottom piece. Yeah. So I'm going to grab both. Now the rectangle should be laying on top. I'm going to subtract. We're just left with the top piece. I'm going to do the same over here. Subtract. Just left with the bottom piece. Now I can move them around. We'll drag these back over here and we're going to make sure they're aligned horizontal. All right. Time for our last name that goes across the middle. Back over to text box. We're going to type in the name. Is that correct? Yep. I hate typing in the names. And for this one, we're going to use the Jakarta signature. And I chose this font because it kept things. The letters were very close to the same size. There were no low hanging swoops at the bottom or large swoops at the top. All right. So what do you think about that? I think I want it stretched from end to end. All right. So make it just this huge bit bigger this way. And I'm going to come up and unlock the aspect ratio. I'm just going to drag it out to the edges. What do you think? I don't know. The biggest smaller, let me see. All right. Smaller. It looks a little too stretched. Too stretched. Yeah. Can you bring it back just a little bit? Why don't I have my hand just reach it back in? Or should I just make it taller? Yeah. Let's try making it taller. Yeah. I think that looks good. I think that's the need to just stretch it out a little bit. All right. So we'll weld these. Okay. Right. So zoom in so they can see exactly what you're doing and why you're doing it. All right. So now that we're happy with it, I'm going to click on the font again and down here, I'm going to weld these. But if I just click score so you can see why and I'll zoom in. Yeah. See how they're overlapping? Now, if I change these to cut, they're still overlapping. So each one of these letters will cut out of the other letter and you'll just have a bunch of pieces. So we're going to weld everything and you'll see how it took out all those little tails that we're touching and it made it all one piece. It's now an object that's no longer, it's no longer a text and you'll see when you select it, you know, get your little text box up here. You can't change the text. It is what it is. We'll just make all of these cut. That's where we're headed. And then let's add the established date. All right. Let's see. We'll insert another rectangle. Come on, the aspect ratio. I don't know. That's a pretty good size. Let's type out our words. Add another text box. We'll put in BST at 2023. And we'll also make this bold. Do you want this one bold also? Bold. We'll make a match. I think it needs the period. EST looks like it's floating a little bit. And can you feel it? Again, it's hard for me to see what just lines in this design. All right. Let me copy that rectangle on the other side. That seems a little thick. I know we don't want it too thin. It'll break. These guys. Let's bring it down to what do you say, eighth inch? What are the ribbon holes? I'm not there yet. Oh, the ribbon holes are eighth of an inch. Okay. Then yeah, I would say about that thick. Okay. And then I'm going to grab all these and go up to align vertically. And then I'm going to distribute horizontally. That one. It's done great. Everything so you can see where it's at. So make sure everything is aligned horizontally. Okay. I think it looks good. All right. That's way easier to see filled in. I can really, couldn't really tell. Let's draw a circle around this and make it a door hanger now. Let's try that circle thing again. I'm drawing a circle around this. Fold and shift. We'll come up top. Let's make sure it's 16 inches with the aspect ratio. It'll be 16 by 16. Hey, that fits pretty nicely on the round. Okay. Let's give it some ribbon slots. So I'm going to insert a shape, basic shapes. And they got this like rounded corner rectangle. Bring this guy up here. I'm like the aspect ratio and I do 1.125, 1.25. Oops. I've Point to 1.25. I forgot the point. That was a big ribbon hole and it didn't take. What was wrong with my point? There it goes. There we go. All right, a couple of pastes. Zoom in. All right, let's get over here. Oh, is that what we want? I needed a, I thought it was a rounded rectangle. I just made it an oval. Yeah, it's kind of oval-y. Let me just put a rectangle in there. Well, can you do a rectangle with rounded corners? Let's see. Shoot. I thought that would work. Oh, here we go. There you go. That's what we want. That's better. I guess you have to hit enter. 1.125. Oh, it is already. You did it. Yeah. It definitely doesn't like the zero. Just put the point. Point. Oh, you know what? This is, I think, a quirky thing. Make it 1.125. 1.125. I hit enter. Yeah. And now change the 1 to a zero. I found this the other day when I was doing something. Oh. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, every time I hit zero point. It does not let you start with a zero. That's good to know. Thanks, babe. And that looks like a much better way to go. Copy paste. I like this because it's kind of like Adobe. You see how it gives me those measurements in between, and it tells me when I'm aligned to make sure I'm aligned correctly. All right. We think, hey, do you need a little hole for greenery? A great question. The sample photo that I'm working from, this is going to be a wedding gift for someone actually has the ribbon and bow kind of on the left hand side. Off to the side. Okay. So you want to like a... It's going to cover it up. I'm thinking maybe, maybe something right there. Right here? Right. Yeah. The letter that is in the example photo that I'm looking at is an S, and so that's easy to push to the right. M does not push to the right. It is the full sign. So I say... So I want to do a copy paste. I want to bring this down to like what, half inch? Yes. Something half of what it is now. I hope it wouldn't let me do point again. I won't. You're going to do 1.5 and then you can change that one to a zero. Enter. Zero. There you go. Isn't that crazy? So that's a little quirky thing. I'm sure they'll figure that out. Copy to the side. And over here. Down a little, down a little. I think right there. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's good. All right. Let's go ahead and cut everything out. Let's make... Well, let's do this. I'm going to copy paste. Make a copy of it. Over here. I don't need this back. All of this stuff here. We're going to move to the red layer. That's my cut layer. Now, all of this stuff here. Just the backer pieces. I'm going to move to my cut layer. Make those red. But I'm going to leave these blue ones score. So now I'm going to set my score set for cut. Now, I don't have my measurements or my settings yet. This was just the design piece, but I think we're good to go. I changed my mind. Can you put the ribbon home in the center at the top? This ribbon home? Okay. Well, I figured, but there it's so close. I might as well. It's going to be touching the thing. So we're just going to do a center version of it. When you first said that, I was like, I hope it's not the phone. As long as we're just moving everything. Yes. I think that's pretty easy. Yeah. Like up in here. Let's make sure everything is all this group these guys. Now let's make sure everything is moving around. Yeah, there we go. All right. Okay. Okay. Sorry. And one more thing, if possible, the score marks. Can we make those just a little smaller than the cut lines? When you cut the letters on the left-hand side there, it actually removes some material and you can see what sometimes people say, the pencil marks go down. Can we make it a little bit smaller? Yeah, we'll grab these. We'll go to outline and we'll give it a negative outline of 0.01. We'll say, okay, we'll put it on a different layer so we can see it. We'll say green. Now if you zoom in, you can see it's slightly smaller. It's about a laser cut smaller. Perfect. Perfect. All right. So I'm going to say cut. I'm just going to cut it, get it out of the way. And I'm going to grab this one, that's control X. I'm going to delete and I'm just going to paste this right back into place. Okay, great. Let's make sure everything is aligned on center. And it took out the middle with some of these letter pieces so you won't see it on the inside either. And then let's put this back on the blue layer. Move to blue layer. I think total design time was about 16 minutes but we could cut that in half if not down to like 25 percent if we had all of the monograms and everything split beforehand. Right. And we're just putting in the last name. Now do you think we could do or should we offer additional fonts, additional monograms styles, or maybe this just gives us the flexibility if somebody really wants something different to do it right on the spot. But I think for now we'll stick with the one font. With the one font. It's the font. Step two, we're going to gather all of our supplies. We needed a piece of quarter inch MDF. This one is 19 by 26. And that's because we're going to run this through the automated conveyor system so we need enough room for what we're cutting plus a little extra room to make sure that it stays in the tension wheels and continues to roll in and out with the conveyor system. But we should be able to get the whole monogram out of this one board. Now I don't need to bring this whole board with me to the craft shows. I'll probably cut the backers out first and then just cut the top pieces out at the show. So I could probably get away with a lot of shorter boards. Yeah, the 12 by 20 laser boards. Yep. Which we offer in our store. You can go check them out at kngmakeit.com. We also are going to need some paint and we have our foxy hues outdoor paints. These are also available in our store. We're going to just do this in pretty much neutral colors undo and stain white and black. Oh yeah, that's pretty basic. And some star bond thick. We're going to use this to glue it all together. Step three, we're going to make all of our cuts. I'm going to bring the quarter inch mdf over to the x tool s one and we're going to cut out our backer and our top pieces. Time to make our cuts. The automatic conveyor system is installed. Our board is installed. We're ready to go. First thing we're going to do is change our canvas to the conveyor feed. Now this gray area is the area that's no longer active inside the laser. So we need to move our backer down right to the top right here. Yep, just right right next to it. Let's move this stuff off the canvas so it doesn't try to cut anything. Now we're going to cut our backer and then we're going to flip the board, move this piece on and cut the top pieces. And as a reminder, the reason why we're doing that is because the conveyor feeder requires an extra 10 inches to keep the board in the conveyor system on the tension wheels. So we can use that 10 inches when we turn it around and flip it and run it through a second time. We're just going to make sure we have tabs on everything. So our score settings, do you remember what our score settings are? 150. That was 150 power. I remember now. I happen to have it right here. Let me see if you are correct. Yeah, I got it. It is 150. Oh, that was close. And 50 percent power. So close. I was just one digit off. Now let's select our cut layer or the red layer. And this we're going to go 100 percent power. Give me a full, honey. Six millimeters per second. You want lower focus on. And Kim suggests we go four millimeters. Lessons learned. We want tab generation on so that nothing falls through and gets stuck as it's moving the material to and fro. And let's see. We want them by spacing. Spaced out every four inches or about 100 millimeters. Tab size, half a millimeter. And then tab power, 20 percent. Now let's measure our board. Here's the laser hand. These little cross hairs. Let's measure the actual thickness of our board. It's going to reset the laser head. That's why it's moving up to the upper right. Yeah, I like how the little red X moves with the laser head. Even this is over Wi-Fi, so it's a little laggy, but that's still really cool. Let's frame this out. Cut this sucker. Here it went to start the laser. I checked my notes for a quarter inch MDF. It is 100 percent power. It was eight inches. That's 150. Now we're just going to move the backer off of our canvas and we're going to move our top pieces on the canvas. We'll check our material depth. Now we're going to frame it out. Let's make sure it doesn't go into the circle. All right, looks good. Endor stain. This one's going to be used for a wedding gift. This is a special order, so we're going to do a distressing technique on that. We're going to use our Foxy Hughes outdoor craft paint. This is meant for outdoors or indoor use. You can hang this outside. It does have all those UV properties in it, so it's weather resistant, UV resistant. For this one, I'm going to stain the backer first, and then I'm going to add a coat of white paint over the top. The white paint on the top is so that I can distress it and sand the edges a little bit so that you'll see the stain through. Again, this is a wedding gift. We're going to bring pre-painted or pre-stained backers to the craft show, so I think I'll just do a set of white, black, stain, and maybe I'll give this option two. This is a little more work. Step five, time to assemble. We're going to glue it together with a little bit of this star bond thick. This will hold everything, and this is great for hanging these outdoors. It'll handle the heat, it'll handle the cold. This glue dries in like 30 seconds, in less than 10 or 15 seconds. It'll be set up so that you can't move it, so you have just enough time to work with it, but it's perfect for doing these quick projects at the craft shows. Best and Strong. Step six, and now we have the exits. We're going to, this, you can see here that our backer here has three holes in it. It's going to have two for ribbon slots here. This is for the hanger, and then there's a little hole here. We call it our little green hole. That's so that we can add some greenery to the top, and we attach it all with zip ties. Well, we attached the bow and the greenery with zip ties. For the hanger here, we're just going to slide this ribbon right through the ribbon slot, tie a little knot in the back. It is the best way we've found to hang it. A little screws, little nails. All of that would be cumbersome at the show anyway. She does this all day long at the show. Even if we don't have customers, she'll stand there and make bows. She could probably make these bows in her sleep. She's got a full bow torturial right here. A full bow torturial. Nope, a torturial. A full bow tortuga right there. Check it out. Full bow tortuga. But we add ribbon hangers and bows all the time at the booth, so this will be no addition to it. So all I'm doing here is I'm putting this greenery. There's a little V here at the end of each one. I am putting the zip ties right through the V. I'm going to put the two V's overlapping and I'm going to put the zip tie right through there and zip tie the whole thing together. Yeah, in your face. There's a camera in the way. And now we're going to zip tie our bow to the greenery. Now this one, I have to make a little cross brace. Yeah, a little double zip. Yeah, I've got to double zip. And then I'll cut all these little extra zip ties off. So I'm also going to put this through. I'm going to make it so you can see. I'm going to cut all these extra little zip tie pieces off. There we go. Now I don't always add greenery at the shows. This is because again, this one's going to be a wedding gift, but you can. We have a link in our Amazon store down below where you can get this. And I think this ends up being, what did I say, like 50 cents or something to add this to your hanger. And I think it adds a whole level of, you know, dimension. I just think it looks a whole lot nicer to add this little greenery. And because it's plastic, it's also weather resistant. Now that we've tested the entire process, I think it could be done at the craft show with a couple of tweaks. Right. I think what we're going to do is we're going to set up a little display board. Option one, pick your backer. We'll have three different painted backers, black, white, stain, something like that. Option two, decide whether you want your name or the word welcome. Some people like the monogram, but they don't really want their name on their front door. So you can choose from several different or maybe three or four different welcome fonts. But if you want to add personalization, we can cut your name right on the spot with the monogram. That'll be an extra 15 to add that to your board. And then we'll have pre-made selections for bows that kind of go with the backers. So you, you can pick one, two, three, and I'll put it together and come back in 15 minutes. It'll be ready for you. It's like signed Chipotle. Yeah. It's my base down to paying a little extra from a guac. Yes. Seriously. I think that, that works and it'll be great. And I think the time that it will take to prep these is, is doable. They can go around and walk around for about 20, 30 minutes, come back and their signs should be all set for ready to go. We are about, we have to go get ready for a craft show, but big thanks to all of our patrons. That's our hangar family. We love them over there. And that is the best way to support this channel. We have a Kim and Garrett After Dark podcast with the after show. We have some free SVGs and a super secret Facebook group. Monthly Zoom calls, lots of fun, lots of extras. So be sure to hit that like button, subscribe. If you're not yet subscribed and be sure to tick that bell to be notified of our new videos each week. And let me see if I can bounce this before it goes off to its final destination. I just got to check the quality.