To kickstart our series of short articles featuring creative materials to work with using your laser cutter, let's take a look at leather! We'll show the process of making labels with automated stichlines using LightBurn.  What is leather? A versatile material, just as your laser cutter is a versatile tool for countless creative projects. It is not like fabric, plastics or wood however, so there is a couple of things to keep in mind when working with leather.     Leather scorches and bends if exposed to too much burning! On the picture above, you can see the first cutting attem ..read more

Most of us enjoy the thrill of reviving old stuff: seeing something dusty, damaged and worn come back to vivid life again after a little (or a lot more) care and work. But restoring is not limited to damaged items: how about those old templates you could find in journals and magazines?  Every picture in this article have been provided by Makerspace Arran.Thank you!   This WW2 journal occasionally provided instructions on how to make silhouette card models for aircraft recognition training, which at the time (around 1943!) served as an educative piece but also a pleasant and ..read more

If you ever tried to do projects with jointed designs, you will be familiar with the struggle of making sure that the tabs and slots are at the exact width and length that matches the material's thickness. If you wanted to use a different material thickness with the same design, you would have to painstakingly resize each tab and slot to accommodate the new material's properties - manually. LightBurn's new Slot & Tab Resizer Tool is made to reduce this workload!   The Resize Slots tool searches for slots or tabs of a specific size, and let you choose a new size for them t ..read more

We prepared a little tutorial on making your own lasercut stamps using LightBurn. Be it for any occasion or reason, stamps are fun in every case! ... Just make sure you always mirror them before lasering, especially if the design has text! In LightBurn, you can make a negative of the stamp by adding an "enclosure" around your pattern. If you make square shaped stamps, or round ones, this is easily done by using the shape tools from the left sidebar.      Don't forget to mirror the text and any non-symmetrical designs!  It is up to your material what sort of cut se ..read more

Who wouldn't enjoy the sight of a small flickering tealight? How about one with a shadowcaster? We prepared a little lasercut project for you to add to your Halloween decorations with some instructions. Be warned! The ghosts of these pumpkins may paint odd images on your walls...     The shadowcaster file is easy to customise inside LightBurn. You can unite and substract shapes, weld them together or prepare arrays using more shapes, and cut them out from the base. The possibilities are limitless. You can also use Cuttle.xyz to make interesting geometrical wonders and merge it with ..read more

To celebrate the international day of coffee, we prepared a little tutorial on how to make a very simple coaster for your favourite mug or cup, without using a ruler or any other measuring tools outside LightBurn Software. Just capture the laser bed with your container on it, and follow the next steps!       This little cup is looking for a coaster! To start the project, make sure your LightBurn Camera is up and running. If you are having trouble with your Camera, check out our related support page!     Capture an overlay of the laserbed using your LightBurn Camera ..read more

You might be wondering why the Fill+Line feature in LightBurn has been taken out of the latest versions of LightBurn, from version 1.2 onwards.     If you load a project from before this update where Fill + Line was used,  you will see that it got renamed to “Multi” in Layer Mode.  To access Fill + Line settings, you have to double-click on the layer.   Notice that it has two "sublayers" now. Sublayers are modifiers inside a Layer, separating Line, Fill and Offset fill inside the same Layer. If you would like to combine Fill with Line inside the same Layer, star ..read more

Plywood is much loved in the maker community, where combined with laser cutters, it's a relatively cheap (compared to solid wood) and is an extremely ideal way to prototype projects, or produce the final product out of the material. Plywood comes in several colours and types of wood, each producing a different look for your project pieces. In this article, we will talk about types of plywood quality grading, usage combined with a laser cutter, how to deal with leftover scraps, and a small project demonstration with Cuttle.xyz.     BUT WHAT IS IT? Generally, the material category of ..read more

Would you like to prepare simple and quick vector designs without having to learn basics of complex professional vector editing software like Illustrator or Inkscape? It seems that the missing link for connecting simple tools meant for beginners or non-professionals with an effective software, is currently in development! There is a neat tool out there now which could be the next addition to your digital workshop: Cuttle.xyz. After playing with the software for a couple of hours, we soon got in touch with Toby Schachman, the founder of Cuttle, and had an exciting chat ..read more

LightBurn is a powerful layout, editing, and control software for your laser cutter. Constantly being improved by the LightBurn developers with the aid of its community and users, it is an ever-evolving tool to aid your CNC projects. Smoke & Mirrors is the official distributor for LightBurn products in the United Kingdom, so find us if you have any questions! Being a versatile creative myself, I love to use LightBurn because it integrates seamlessly with my general workflow of preparing props for art pieces, prototypes, models or even accessories to go well with different material media (s ..read more