Create Stunning 3D Laser Cut City Map Ornaments – Simple & Profitable Holiday Craft!

we have the best fourth quarter seller and the perfect affordable gift idea these easy 3D map ornaments and we'll show you how we made them right now what is up welcome back do you like to do it Builder or make it so do we and we have new videos each week it's holiday season and custom 3D map ornaments are the perfect affordable gift idea did you go on vacation this summer maybe you went to the lake maybe you visited a new town maybe you recently moved places evoke emotional responses so to create an ornament that is a momento of a place that you visited is a great gift idea and they're hot sellers now we've done these 3D maps before a couple of years ago maybe I don't remember but we use snazzy maps and Adobe Illustrator that was pretty involved for newbies but I think we got a newbie proof solution step one we're going to gather all our supplies we're cutting these ornaments out of some wood we're going to use some E8 inch Birch and some E8 inch Walnut and because the roads are going to get super tiny and be impossible to glue we're going to use some of this double-sided like adhesive tape we're also going to use just a little bit of our foxy Hughes paints here because we do need to color in that water we have a river going through ours so we're going to paint it blue so it really pops and stands out this is going to be an ornament so we need to add a little ribbon for the a little bow to your ornament we're going to add a little twine we're going to use some starbond thick to do the gluing and another piece of the ornament that doesn't have the tiny little roads on it and then we have some wooden beads each of the ornaments are going to have a wood bead on them that is it step two we're going to make our design we're going to be using the laser mat maker software this software is great way to make easy laser cut Maps we're going to be making an ornament for this particular project but you don't have to make ornaments you can make large wall siiz hangings you can even tile them so that you can take one design and separated it into multiple tiles and it makes this process so easy we're going to be using the starter application we're just going to go through the little starter track and a couple of clicks couple of Clacks and you got yourself a map yes so let's meet you over in the software here we are in laser mat maker laser matm maker.com we started with a free trial you can try it for free this gives you two weeks and nine credits for the ornament that we'll be doing we'll be using three credits so this will give you an opportunity to try maybe three different ornaments with three different locations or technically it's three different exports we've already created our free trial we're going to select a new project here and then we're going to call our project name Richmond Virginia ornament 2 I'm going to do that and then you can choose your template here you can start with a blank template or a starter template we're going to use the starter template today to keep it simple and it's really all that I needed to do this project so starter template create project and here we are right in the mat maker the first thing we're going to want to do is Select our location or choose our coordinates so we're going to go over here to the search bar on the right hand side and say search slet coordinates so if I search Richmond Virginia here we are pretty zoomed in for Richmond Virginia and we can go with that or I'm going to want to zoom out a little bit here so I can just click on zoom and now I'm just using the scroll button on my mouse and I'm going to zoom out a little bit so the James River is a pretty important feature with in Richmond and then these set of roads here are called The Fan so I want to make sure they're in there because that's what people are going to recognize they're going to recognize the river river and they're going to recognize the fan so I think this is a pretty good view here and because this is an ornament we're going to want to change the shape so over here on the right hand side map shape we'll click that and change it to a circle all right I'm liking that let me go back to my zoom let me just see yeah I'm going to zoom out just a little bit again I don't want to lose too much of the roads here but I do want to see the fan so I think that looks pretty good the next thing we're going to do is preview our export it's going to prepare the map layers and we have to stay on this screen a moment while it does the preparation all right it has created our three layers for us it has a land layer which will be our cut layer you can see here the next layer is the land layer engrave and then the third layer is the roads layer and that looks good too from here I can just click export export cost is three credits because I have three layers here and just select export I confirm that I have reviewed my layer and options and then export once it's done with the export you can see here that it's processing and this is going to take take about a minute or two for it to finish processing and once it says complete then I can download my zip file now that the processing has complete completed we can see that we have each of our SVG layers each layer is its own SVG so you'll see the land layer cut SVG land layer engrave SVG and then roads layer cut SVG it's also going to create a satellite view here which we aren't going to use but it will export that it'll also export this attribution SVG this is just showing that we're using mattebox but we won't use the either of these svgs that it creates we're just just going to use these three here we are in lightburn we're going to import our file that we just exported from mat maker say file import we're going to start with our roads layer this comes in pretty large the first thing I'm going to do is delete this outer frame I'm not going to use that and then I'm going to select everything and say controll G it's important to group these items because we're going to be doing some things with them where they need to be grouped so I'm going to just do that first thing and then I'm going to change the size of this of this it's at 14 in right now so I'm going to change it down to 4 in which will be ornament size but I'm going to make sure my aspect ratio is locked so it changes the width and height at the same time all right now we're down to 4 in we're going to put this on the red layer this is red we use for cutting so this we're going to cut out and then I'm going to add a little rectangle here because I want to add a little Banner that actually says Richmond Virginia now this isn't going to really work because you can see it's outside of the circle frame so I'm going to go back to my selection tool and I'm going to convert this rectangle to path convert to path and now I'm going up here and I'm going to click edit nodes there's your menu button there and now I can adjust my rectangle so that it is inside the perimeter of the circle there we go now with my rectangle and then my roads layer all grouped I'm going to select everything and then over here on the Le leftand side I'm going to select weld all selected shapes together there we go now we have a little Banner where I can actually type the name of the city I'm going to go ahead and do that now I'm going to select my type tool here and then I'm going to type Richmond I'm going to do it all caps Richmond Virginia I'm going to put this in the black layer this will be engrave and you can see already selected the mode as fill and then I'm going to put that right here in the middle zoom in let's see just going to eyeball this for now now this looks good I'm going to select everything click contrl G Slide that out of the way and import the other layers so I'm going to say file import I'm going to import the land layer again it comes in really large so the first thing I'm going to do is delete the frame and then I'm going to select everything click contrl G and I'm going to put this on the red layer again I'm going to change the size to 4 in and that's our back layer now I'm going to import the land layer engrave here we are now again I'm going to first change this to 4 in so I can work with it a little bit now as we look at this layer when it comes in you can see I'm going to zoom in a little bit you can see that there's a pink layer that has an outer the outside edge and then there's an inside edge of the street layer now we know we don't need that inside side edge I'm not going to be cutting that I'm not going to be engraving that so I'm just going to remove that so I can just click on it and I can hit delete and remove that one this outer layer is going to be a cut layer so I'm going to change that to Red no I'm going to not show that and then I'm going to select the roads here and to make sure I get everything now I'm going to hit contrl G I want to group these and now I'm going to bring back my circle layer now I want to combine the river layer here in the Middle with the roads layer so I'm actually going to with my roads grouped I'm going to stack this right on top of where the river is so here going to bring this down that is already grouped the roads are already grouped so I'm going to select the both of them and Center them and now you can see that the roads and the river are centered you'll see the river is running right through where the Gap and the roads are now that looks great so I'm going to cut out the river and engrave the roads I'm going to group these two together now contrl G and now this third third layer here will be the backer layer I can paint this blue so that you'll see the river behind the street layer now we have all three layers of our ornament the next thing we're going to need to do is create a little hole for the string so that we can hang our ornament so I'm going to create a little circle over here and let's see says .156 is that about right I think that'll work so we're going to select our Circle select our outer frame and we're going to go up here and say oh the second one here align top now we know that this is aligned to the top and it's aligned in the middle align V Center top middle perfect I'm going to copy that same Circle crl Ctrl V I'm going to bring it over here to this layer let's make sure everything is grouped before we do this contrl G we're going to put our little circle here and I'm going to select them both and we're going to align V Center and then align top now that's the same and we're going to do the same thing crl c contrl v I'm going to put it over over here and select them both align V Center and then align top now all three of these are in the same place so I'm going to select them all can I move them all at one time I'm not 100% sure about this I'm going to hit control shift so that I can do micro movements and then I'm just going to move them down a little bit think I'm going to move it down a little bit more that looks pretty good that's going to give me enough room at the top it's inside this Frame here and now we know they're all in the same place on the ornament so I'm going to go ahead and group each of these so we don't lose that all right and now we have the three layers of our ornament this will be our roads layer it's going to be cut this is going to be the center layer which will have the street names engraved and the river cut out and then this will be the layer that's going to be painted blue so that you can see the river through it that'll be the bottom layer now before we exit this let's update our speed and power settings now that our export is completed I'm going to go back in and show you some other features that you can change and adjust and modify I wanted to keep it simple for our first export but do want to show you that there are some other options that you can modify here here you can see for the land layer each layer has some options both are selected land fill waterfill for the land layer engrave roadways primary streets there's only one selection it's selected and then roads layer you can see here there are 14 items selected so you can click to select them all but they were already selected you saw the 14 and you can choose to include or not include some of these for us all of them were fine I don't have a bunch of these things in my city but in your city or town you may want to include or uh not include some of these items another thing that you can do let me expl expand that under roadway primary click the three dots or just click the layer in and of itself and then you can make some s some adjustments over here so feature filters the zoom range can change so here you can see I put the back to where it was but if I zoomed in some of the roads go away we might not want to see all of the roads but like I mentioned uh this our town is famous for the fan so I wanted to make sure that we included the fan in the roadways you can change the line color so ours is currently under uh black but if I wanted to change it to something else you can make that change and it'll let's see there you go click override it'll change the primary roads and change their color I'm just going to put it back to black there we go you can also change the opacity and the line width this is one of the primary things I wanted to show you on this view the default is set to seven but if these end up being too thin for you and the roads end up the cuts are just too tiny you can change it in the demo video that laser mat maker has for ornaments I think that Elias changes his to 14 and that's going to give you a much wider cut area for the road which is great but in my case it really loses some of the detail in the city and combine some of these fan streets so I'm going to put mine back to seven knowing that my roads are going to be a little bit thin and then you can change the line join from bevel round miter so I just wanted to show you some of the other features that were including included and adjustments that you can make to your map step three we're going to make all of our Cuts we're going to bring our two pieces of wood over to our mtech polar and we're going to cut out our ornaments [Music] step four time to assemble we're going to paint the backer blue to make it look like some water then we're just going to pull the tape off of this backer slap it on this one and then slap this on the backer easy as pie [Music] step five time to dress it up for the holidays it's looking nice but now we want it to sell and make it feel like it's a real product so we're going to add a little hanger with some twine a bead and a little bow and I'm going to show you how to make a little bow and we're going to go ahead and uh drop it in a little cellophane bag with a backer on it and uh it looks professional I'm going to show you how to make a cute little bow for the top of your ornament so this is cut at 14 in I'm going to use this two finger method my fingers are kind of short but I can still do it so I'm going to put a little bit out here I'm going to leave a little for a tail I'm going to go from left to right wrap it around my fingers and then once it's here I'm going to come back and tuck it down underneath Garett should be doing this you've got the long fingers this would be perfect for you I know my fingers don't touch ribbon and now it crosses over right here I'm just going to tuck this in and under right here this is velvety so it's a little hard to get it in there and I'm going to make sure the Velvet is showing on top get that velvet depending upon your Ribbon you may or may not have to fiddle with it quite that much much there's your little bow so I'm going to slide it off my fingers and now I can just pull it through I'm going to pull it through using the little Loops here make it tight whoa who don't know your own strength right I'm just pulling it away I'm pulling away this thing there we go cute little bow and now I'm going to use these tiny zip ties of course you can use um hot glue or um probably just star Bond some um you know Wire yeah I probably could but I figure if they're going to stay year after year then a glue might mess up if you have your ornament in your in your attic or something so I can attach it with a tiny zip tie and then we're going to cut ourselves a little piece of twine we want about 3 in at the top so let's see let me see what this is I'm going to cut this at about 12 in oo 12 in doesn't have to be exact and I'm going to first feed it through the bead pretty simple and then feed it through my ornament oh I guess I didn't have to do the bead first and then we're going to tie our little bow right to the top don't mind the backer it's a stunt double oh yeah don't worry about the back of this this one's perfect now we're just going to drop these little guys into these little packages that Kim made they're just a little cellophane envelope with a card stock in here right I just found this little design right on canva I just searched for holiday card printed them on some card stock using my regular old printer and then all we have to do is drop our ornaments in fix your bow fix your bow that might be the hardest part really struggling with yours don't forget the BR Briand the back of your ornament we don't have it on these just because we haven't done it yet but we will before we sell them that's cute little guy a little cute little packaging oh you're sealing it up well I have tons of these these things look so cute in their little packaging I I might actually buy one of these little things and I'm I'm not an ornament buyer these are great uh you can sell these I think for somewhere between 12 and 15 you can offer a bundle of these maybe maybe two for 25 or $15 each so whatever you think they'll go for in your area they're a great gift idea and I think there's a pretty good profit margin here oh there is a great profit margin these are easy to do I think once you do an area you can pump a ton of these out and you could probably leave this front Banner open and if you have a laser at your booth like the F1 or something you could throw names and stuff on there woo that'd be a good seller right there that that is a good chunk of change well we're about out of time I have to go make some more ornaments you have to go test out laser mat maker see what kind of ornament you can make otherwise big thanks to all of our patrons we love you guys and that is the best way to support this channel that is the best community over there it's holiday season it's holiday season and it's holiday season and Custom ornaments do you like to do it build it or make it so do we and it's I forgot my own line that I've said 400 and something times at least it's holiday season and custom ornaments it's the holiday season and custom personalized fun cust just custom ornaments it's holiday season and Custom it's ridiculous then I got a ball sack clickity clack you got yourself a map