Personalized Gift Basket for Knitting

For my girlfriends birthday I wanted to make her something a bit more personalized for her to place her knitting stuff in. In hindsight I probably should've picked a basket that didn't have so many parts that can snag but I liked the aesthetic. I purchased a design from Yarnliving which included the wool and buttons needed for a cardigan.

This project would not be possible for me without Copenhagen Fablab an open access, shared and user-driven tool workshop. (Facebook - Website)

• Laser Cutter
• Glue Gun
• Wood (or other material acrylic etc)
• Basket
• Ribbon

In order to laser ingrave you must create a vector-based .pdf file. You can create vector images in the free open source program Inkscape or the paid Adobe Illustrator.

I measured my material in length and height and created a circle in Inkscape with those same proportions and put it in the uppermost left corner, this will act as my guide. This is here to help me position my design and will later be removed.

I picked a font I liked and added it to my design.

I found an image of an icon I liked from google images, but it was a jpg image. I needed to convert it to vector format. To do this I right clicked the image in the layers section and selected trace bitmap, shortcut ctrl + alt + b.

Remove the guide circle and save the document as .pdf. Save it to a USB stick and head to your laser cutter.

I arrived at Copenhagen FabLab (A great free resource for creatives in Copenhagen) and got introduced to their facility by superuser Mette. I tested the laser cutter was positioned correctly by testing on some throwaway cardboard. Then I played around with the parameters on the backside (power vs speed) until I got a result I liked most for my material.

After calibrating the machine (Wont go into specifics as each machine is different.) I placed the material as best as I could in the top left corner and cut my design.

I wanted to remove some of the burn marks on the surface of the wood to get a cleaner finish. Not a remarkable difference but I think it adds a bit more contrast to the text.

I wanted to cut a groove into the back for a place to rest the smaller knitting needles. I used sandpaper and a file and a small ikea knife to whitle away the material.

I opted for glue after the bolt solution I explored didn't hold well enough. Reminder: Use paper towels as my hot glue gun had a blockage which made a big mess, I was very glad I had the paper towel there.

The plastic packet the buttons came in was not very nice so I made an origami box following this youtube tutorial.

I placed the wool inside the basket and wrapped a mushy heart out of a ribbon. Job done and she was very pleased.