 It's up! Welcome back! Do you like to do a builder make it? So do we! And we have new videos each week, every Tuesday and Friday! Thank you for joining our session today! We thought we'd share a little more about us before we get started! We are small business owners, full-time crafters! We started with a YouTube channel about five years ago, we grew out of our home, and we grew into some warehouse space where we have production in the bag, and we offer DIY workshops in the front. You can also find us online at KNGmakeit.com where we offer laser cut craft kits, paints, and accessories. Today we're going to show you how to elevate your laser crafting game with some 3D door hangers. Step one, we're going to gather all of our supplies. We needed some quarter-inch MDF for this project. This is where we're going to cut all of our little pieces out of. If you're doing it on a desktop laser, you're probably going to need three or four boards. We're also going to use some of our Foxy Hughes outdoor craft paints. We're going to use some Varathane stain, Varathane's briar smoke stain. Then we're going to use some Starbond thick glue. This will get in all the little cracks, hold everything together. Step two, we're going to make all of our cuts. I'm going to take this quarter-inch MDF, obviously laser, to cut out all of our little pieces. We use late burn, but our files work in any of the major laser applications. Inside late burn, we're just going to import our image. We're going to use an SVG for this one. We do include an SVG, an AI version, a DXF version, a desktop version, or is in most of them. We also include a picture so that you know what you're putting together in the end. We're going to import our SVG. Let's arrange it on our board. Now I'm using a 100 watt laser, so for this one, well for all of our files, we use red for cut, blue for score, green for a deep score, and black is usually fill. So let's go ahead and set up parameters. I want 10 millimeters per second. This is a score. I want 200 millimeters per second and 15 percent power, and then for my cuts, I'm going to want 10 millimeters per second at 50 percent power. Like we said, these work in almost any of the applications. Here's Glowforge. We'll go ahead and import into Glowforge. Now for this one, I'm going to use the desktop version. That way, if you don't have a passthrough, you can still make this at 16 inches, except this one includes a puzzle piece. So here's the bottom puzzle piece of your backer, and here's the top puzzle piece of your backer, and then the banner will sit over top and cover that puzzle piece and give it some more strength. And again, here is X-Tool Creative Space. Let's import that same desktop one. This is if we're using our X-Tool P2. We don't want to scale. So again, here is our image. Here is the bottom. Here's the top. Inside X-Tool, I use 6 millimeter MDF. That's the settings I use for the cutting. And inside Glowforge, I like to use thick draft board. Thick draft board will cut through at a quarter inch. No problem. All right. Back to X-Tool. Let's go make our cut. Step three. Now we stain and paint. Like I said, we're going to use this Faritheen Briar Smoke. Did you even know you could stain MDF? You can, and it looks great. It gives it an extra whoa. Yeah, I don't know how I did that. I'm just using a simple paper towel, and I'm going to dip it in my stain, wipe it on, stain on, stain on. Yeah, that's exactly it. Wipe it on, wipe it off. We just don't want to leave it on there. It dries. If you leave it too thick, it dries kind of sticky. So if it doesn't look even, don't worry. It'll even out when you wipe it off. We don't have to do the middle here. If you see that I'm not staining the middle, that's because I'm going to put the center banner over this area, and you won't see it. Won't see it. And this way the glue will stick a lot better. So I'm just making it so I can kind of see the grain a little bit, getting all that excess stain on. Perfect. Put this out of the way. Now it's time to paint all of our top pieces. You'll see that we have score marks in some of our pieces. This is so that you can place the pieces that go on top of them with perfect placement. We're going to paint right over them. Don't worry about it. You'll barely be able to see them in the end, and that's really all you need, and that's really all you want. We're going to be using again our Foxy Hughes Outdoor Craft Paint. So this paint has UV properties, weather resistant properties. It's perfect for these outdoor signs. I'm just going to use this little FIFO bottle, scored a little at the top of our plate. You can see here it's just at the top of the plate. And that's so when I use our little 4-inch foam roller here, you see we reuse our rollers. It's fall. We're going to use this orange a thousand times this fall. Easy. So we're going to put our little handle in here, push it on, and then I can grab the paint from the side of my little, what would you call that? Paint blob. My little paint blob right at the top. Now you don't want too much paint on this handle. I'm going to show it a close-up on the camera. This is too much paint. It's going to end up oozing over the sides of your pieces, and you don't want that. These look the best when you can kind of keep the sides clean and dark. Ooze free. And I'm going to show you a little trick because nobody can paint it perfect. I've painted hundreds of these sides. I still can't paint it perfect. So we have a little trick for you at the end. I'll show you how to clean them up. All right, like Garrett said, we're just going to paint right over our little piece here, right over our score marks. You can't see it for a moment there, but as it dries you'll be able to see the image so you'll know exactly where to put the word fall. Now we'll set that aside and we're going to give that a second coat in just a minute. Now we're going to do the bottom half here. We're doing this in a light brown. Thank you. Yes, thanks. I had a second roller, but I think it handled it. I'll be your lovely assistant. Thanks. Again, I'm just going to put the paint on the edge of my plate. Roll it. Just show them what it looks like when you have enough paint in there. Yeah, you can still see the spunky. So here you can still see the foam sponge. You can still see it's porous and doesn't have too much paint on it. And I'm just going to roll right over the top, right over all these little whole pieces. It doesn't ooze down in there because I only have a little bit of paint on my roller. And a little bit of pressure. You're not pushing too hard. True. Very true. Just trying to paint the top. Alright, so we got that one done. Now for our smaller pieces here you can see we have some tape. When these come off of the laser we add this little Peters tape and we make ourselves a little tape pallet. The painters tape getting them off the lasers keeps all the pieces in the frame. We package these in these little frames so that they're easy to ship. And they're easier to get off the laser that way. And it kind of keeps everything together and protected during its travels either to their paint room or to someone's house. Even to the front to the workshop. Yeah, or to the workshop. Alright, so I'm just going to lift up our frame. All our little pieces come out. I'll make sure you see this little triangle right here. Alright, so let's do the word fall. Put that here. We're going to do this in antique white. I could feel this already has. Because I'm reusing the rollers, they already have paint in them. So sometimes you don't even have to add any more paint under your roller. Again, you're trying to keep those clean edges. So the less paint you have on your roller, you want just enough paint. It's hard to describe. I don't want too much. I don't want to ooze it out. I don't want too little so that I have to push down really hard. Last thing I wanted to show you is that you can mix paints. So for these other two leaves, so I don't have to add or find another fall color. I'm just going to mix a little bit of the red and a little bit of the orange. And I'm just going to dab on here and hopefully give it like a little fall leaf color. See, pretty cool, right? I'm going to dab the sponge in the yellow. And I'm going to give this one kind of a yellowy orange backer. All right, now I have four different fall leaves. And then we could just kind of put them together. You're ready for our super secret tip to how to keep these things looking sharp. Keep these edges looking black. It's a black, sharpie paint pen. You know, you just run it down the sides. You know, you might not be as skilled with the roller as Kim. So you just take it, run it down the side. And it's not about getting up to the edge. It's about cleaning up any drips. It gives that visual appearance of a straight edge. Yeah, all you want to do is make it look like a nice straight line. And then your eyes going to glance over it. And it's not going to look like it's over the edge at all. Yeah. But I'm so good, you're having a hard time finding edges to clean. Now, usually you don't have to clean the bottom edge because it'll be hidden by the bottom layer. But I'm just gonna go ahead and just demonstrate. That's it. That's it. I think everything else is clean, right? Yeah. You did a great job. Thanks. Very little cleanup. I feel like you're looking. You're trying to find something to clean it up. What is that? What is it? Oh, that's gonna cost you, babe. Good to see you. Not all heroes wear capes. Moving on with that star bond thick. And we're gonna work our way out of the sign and then up from the backer. And we're just gonna use a little bit of glue. Kim likes to use the dot method. Well, you don't have for a large surface, you want to just squeeze the glue. But if you're doing tiny little pieces, let's say when we get to these little acorn pieces here, they're kind of small, the dots are gonna allow you to get just a little bit of glue and not too much glue. The thing with the star bond is it adheres so well, the two pieces of MDF, like they are not coming apart. But it does dry with a little bit of haze around it. So if you've got a dark backer like this, you do not want to put too much glue and you don't want to ooze it out from underneath or around the sides. So you want just kind of a medium amount of glue, medium amount of paint and a medium amount of glue. And I can still see my score marks. So lining this up is super easy. There's also two ways that we do our glue in. You can glue the piece or you can glue the backer and then put the piece in. If it's got score marks, it makes it a lot easier to know where to put the glue. This is Garrett and I, we go round and round. I'm like, oh it's easier to glue the piece because then I'll know, I won't, I'll know exactly where it goes because it's only a piece itself. And Garrett said you can glue inside the score marks. Yeah, glue inside the score marks. That's how I like to do it. And here you can see we're gluing these bottom pieces or this bottom layer again from the bottom to the top. And that way everything stacks one on top of the other and you don't, less than learned, you don't want to put your pieces at the top, put your pieces at the bottom, and then try and squeeze something in the middle because inevitably it starts drying and it's too close together and you can't get it in there. There's no moving it. You got like 30 seconds to move it around and get it in place. And then after about 30 seconds it is there for life. That is where it lives now. Yeah here you can see Garrett's just doing it right on the backer. And again these score marks allow that perfect placement so nothing ends up wonky. Your L's aren't laying backwards or forwards. Things are trying to come with me in pieces. That's right. So we're not going to put fall on yet because we don't have this back layer of acorns on. Working from the leaves and acorns on. Working from the backer up. You know how many times we glued these, the word fall down before we did the leaves. Yeah. To me. Lessons learned for sure. It's definitely an embarrassing amount of times. Do you want to do these? Like then you do like to do special wires. Like cock-eyed off-center. Well no you see line the bottom of the leaf up with the bottom of the leaf there and line those up. Like that. Really just gonna add ribbon slots that we have and then a bow on top. We have tried every method for attaching a hanger to the door signs. We glued them. We glued it. We nailed it. Screwed it. Screwed it. We could not get anything that would look nice that would hold. So we found these ribbon slots. Now this ribbon slot you just poke it through. Tie a knot on the back side. You're gonna let me get closer to it. No. Forget it. I don't usually do it standing up but for the video I'm gonna do it standing up. Now I'm just gonna tie a little knot in the back and this is what's gonna actually hold it. It's never coming off. It's the best method and it's the simplest method. No extra gluing, screwing, nailing, nothing. And if you want to swap it or steal that ribbon for something else you just untie the little knot in the back or clip it. There we go. Now we got ourselves a little hanger. And then this I pre-made our bow. This is the world's easiest bow. It's got four pieces of ribbon, a little piece of burlap in the back. We have a video tutorial on our YouTube channel. Show you exactly how we make this. The easiest bow. And I, which side is it going? This side. Left or right? Well right because of those leaves. Oh yeah. Alright I guess from that view it's left right. Left right. Alright I'm using these cute little zip ties. They also make it super easy. And my little pair of scissors right here. I'm gonna snip off the excess zip tie. And there you have it. So we're all in at about $16 for this thing and they go for about $55 in our neck of the woods. That's right. If you're using your laser as a side hustle this is a great item to make with your laser and then be able to sell at craft shows or social media online. Let's say on Facebook to your family and friends. And it's a nice little profit in each one of them. Yeah and it actually gets easier if you start to batch them out. If you can do multiples at a time. That way you're doing a multiples of backers and then painting all the little top pieces and gluing everything together at one time do two to six. It's even more efficient. More efficient. You'll just pump right through them. Well thank you again for joining our session today. We do appreciate you joining us. If you're looking for us you can always find us over at K&GMaking.com. You can find it at Kim and Garrett making it on our YouTube channel. Or we have a huge Patreon following with a great group of folks. So if you're learning and new to laser crafting or you're interested in doing more door hangers we have a nice community and a Facebook page where folks go on and share what they're making, share their tips and tricks. It's a great community.