How to Professionally Finish Your Homemade Gifts and Products

Amanda
by Amanda
2 Materials
$30
10 Minutes
Easy

With sites lite Hometalk, Pinterest, and Etsy, everyone can explore their creative side! If you really want to make your gifts and products look more professional, mark them with your own personal signature. In the past, I was painting or ironing a small version of my logo on my creations. Recently, I received a power engraver, so I have been playing around with it.

This particular engraver is supposed to work on tile, metal, stone, and wood, and can adjust for various depths and material hardness. There are a ton of different brands and styles, so you will have to play around with your settings. So far I have only tried it on wood.

It does take some getting used to, so grab some scrap pieces to practice on.

To start, I drew out a simplified version of my logo. Because you are engraving by hand, you don’t want anything too detailed or it will take forever to engrave. I started with engraving soft wood, so I placed my design on top of my board and firmly traced it with my pencil. I have a tool somewhere that looks like a pen with a metal ball on each end, but I couldn’t find it. A ballpoint pen would also work.

After you remove the paper, you may need to gently trace the lines of your design to see it better while engraving.

Carefully start going over your design with the power engraver. I found it is best to go over everything very lightly first, with the engraver on a low setting, and then come back over at your desired depth after. This will get a small groove started in the wood and make it less likely for the engraver to jump out of your design as you encounter different material densities (ie-wood grains).

Practice several times to get used to it.

When you finish engraving, use a small paint brush or q-tip and add some stain or paint into the grooves. If you carefully wipe the surface as you go, you can be a little sloppier with the application.


Some of my tips and observations:

-straight lines are much easier than curved lines when going over wood grain.

-I started with the engraving needle perpendicular to my surface for the entire first pass, and thencame back around everything at a slight angle to add dimension.

-Wear ear plugs! The sound isn’t too bad for a very short time period, but my ears started ringing after about a minute.

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