I was very engaged by both the felting and laser cutting processes. I wanted to put the two processes together to create a felt patch from scratch with a design I had made earlier.
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Process
I started trying to create the felt swatch with only needle felting but that wasn't creating a dense enough structure so I incorporated water felting. I made a tub from the bottom of a gallon jug, boiled water and mixed it with some soap and massaged the felt until it became very dense, this worked well. I applied the iron on patch material to stiffen the felt for the laser cutter and make it into a patch. I had limited material so I did a lot of small tests with the laser cutter to make sure the cutting process would be successful. I first had to deal with 2 malfunctioning laser cutters (of course) but finally the third seemed promising with a speed of 5 and power of 25. But I guess due to some unseen issue with my .DXF file the laser cutter decided to go over each cut twice and this totally burned up my patch.
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Product
I created a mess, a wierd charred patch. But given another opportunity to do this I would made a cute water and needle felted patch, of marbled color, cut out with the laser cutter and ironed and sewn onto a plain black tee.
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Reflection
Well obviously I wouldn't let the laser cutter burn up my patch, I would probably test not only the speed and strength, which I did, but test the pattern because that is actually the only place where I ran into issues.
