Amy Coronado : Box and Earrings

The Box:

The box is made out of 1/8" plywood, laser cut to specifications I laid out in Solidworks. I attempted to account for kerf at first, to allow the tabbing to hold the box together via friction, but all my test models either didn't fit or were too loose, so I ended up using wood glue to fortify the tabbing. I designed the living hinge on the back based on ellipses (which I thought was pretty clever because the failure points I saw on a lot of examples of living hinges happened at the corners, so by eliminating corners, I lessened the chance of hinge cracking in my design) and patterned it as an extruded cut on a flattened version of my box spine. I designed my box spine originally with a curve, and then I measured that spine and created the flattened version from that. Again, due to the frustrating lack of friction in the tabbing, I drilled holes and used screws and string to make a clasp of sorts, inspired by the closing mechanism of manila envelopes. I also added an engraved bitmap of a Christmas tree and a To/From space to complete the theme.

The Earrings:

After many unsatisfactory iterations of my original concept, and the realization that my project was turning out to be Christmas-themed, I decided to bitmap photos of snowflake outlines I found on the internet for the earring shapes (which, as it turns out, is something I actually know my mom likes in jewelry, so it'll make a perfect Christmas gift). I took photos from various google images and bitmap traced them in Inkscape, and then saved them as DXFs that I cut/engraved on the laser cutter. I couldn't seem to get metal earring mounts from anywhere close, so as a temporary alternative (for viewing only) I made some out of wire.

Inspiration: https://www.firstpalette.com/Craft_themes/Colors/papersnowflake/steps-images/papersnowflake-4-8-side.jpg