With the chaotic current state of the world as we come to grips with the COVID 19 pandemic, this week I needed a manageable DIY project that could restore a little bit of normality within the confines of my home.
I’ve battled with my spice drawer for a long time, and had a few not-so-successful attempts at organising it. Enough is enough. This time, I think I’ve won.
My plan was to stock up on IKEA RAJTAN spice jars, and customise them with custom cork labels that I could design at home and cut/engrave using my Glowforge. Every jar would be the same size and shape, and by attaching labels to the lids I’d be able to find spices at a glance!
Here is how it all went.
MATERIALS & COST
- 40 IKEA RAJTAN spice jars: $29.90
(I have a lot of spices! These jars are a generous size, and come in affordable sets of 4 for $2.99. I purchased a few extra just in case, because I can always use them to store art materials) - 1 roll of 60 x 120cm cork sheet: $8.99
(I purchased mine locally from Thing-a-me-bobs. The project definitely didn’t call for this much cork – I’d say you could get away with 2-3 A4 sized pieces – so I’ll add the rest to my materials stash!) - 1 can of spray adhesive, or similar: ~ $10, but I already had some lying around.
(Feel free to substitute for another suitable type of glue or adhesive tape. This is just what I had on hand. Pro tip – if you can, maybe try sourcing some cork that’s already got an adhesive backing!)
PROCESS
I knew that I wanted the labels to have various hand-written fonts inside floral hand-drawn borders. I can paint really well in oils, but I suck at drawing accurate circles, so my first step was to draw a bunch of light grey 5cm circles in Adobe Illustrator and print them out on A4 printer paper.
This allowed me to sit down and doodle away, coming up with decorative borders for the jars, inspired by some other examples I’d come across on Pinterest.
By starting on printer paper I found there was no need to be too precious about making mistakes, so I dove in and used a black fineliner right from the start. Having said that, you could definitely start out in pencil and trace over it once you’ve nailed the designs.
Once I’d filled a page, I scanned it onto my PC and imported the design to Adobe Illustrator.
I then cut the scanned image up and saved each frame individually. Then, those were imported to Canva, where I played around with various font and border combinations until I was 100% happy. Each label had its own seperate page in my Canva document, so I could download the finished designs as individual PNG’s. Once downloaded, these images would form the ‘engrave’ component in the Glowforge.
I’m 100% sure you could do this start to finish in illustrator, but I’m not super familiar with it yet so I ended up messing around a little across seperate programs to get what I wanted.
Once I had the engrave designs ready, I imported them into Illustrator where I had set up an artboard full of 5cm circles (with a coloured stroke, and no fill) which the laser software would recognise as ‘cut’ lines.
The IKEA RAJTAN spice jar lids measure a touch over 5cm in diameter, and I wanted the labels to be ever so slightly inset from the edges. I scaled my designs to 5cm exactly, and was really happy with the eventual fit.
After aligning the engrave and cut components, I exported the designs as pdfs, and got ready to Glowforge them!
I love cork!
Since it’s a non-proofgrade material, there are no ‘official’ recommended settings. After my first trial didn’t seem to engrave at all, I hopped onto the Glowforge Community Forum and found some helpful advice.
The settings below are what worked best for me, but I’d say there will be a lot of variations between cork products. As always, proceed with caution and common sense when testing new materials in the vicinity of lasers!
ENGRAVE SETTINGS
Speed: 1000
Precision Power: 30
Grayscale: Vary Power
Minimum Power: 3
Margin Optimization: Max Quality
Lines Per CM: 180, # of Passes: 1, Focus Height: 2mm
CUT SETTINGS
Speed: 200
Precision Power: 100
# of Passes: 1, Focus Height: 2mm
Maybe it was just me, but spray adhesive was a slightly messy process and I ended up with gluey hands pretty early into my 36 odd spice jar labels. It was effective though.
I found the best method of ensuring good adhesion was to sit the jars upside down on a flat surface for a couple of hours once I had the label in position. If I skipped that step, the cork tended to curl up at the edges. This probably wouldn’t happen if you purchase flat sheets of cork, but mine came rolled up fairly tightly.
Here are some pretty pictures of the end results!
I’m thrilled with the end result!
However, after transferring all my spices I realised I’ve missed out a couple of important ones… so this project is not quite over just yet!
My only dilemma is that not all of the jars fit inside one drawer now (but to be fair, they barely fit as it was before). Does this mean I should build a spice rack next? Maybe! I would love to have these out on display now that they’re perfectly presentable (and alphabetised!).
Feeling inspired?
Use my referral link to purchase your own Glowforge, and save up to $500 USD off the RRP. The fabulous folks there will make it a win-win and throw a few extra materials my way.
Also, make sure to join the Glowforge Community forums to discover a wealth of knowledge, experience and inspiration
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