Happy Year of the Tiger! We’re celebrating the first full moon of the new lunar year with a lantern festival! We’ll meet in Prospect Park on Sunday, February 28, to share our homemade lanterns. And to get ready, we’re holding a lantern-building workshop on Tuesday the 23rd, graciously hosted by Bug Labs!

lantern photo by jnthnhys

Lantern-Building Workshop
Tuesday, February 23, 6-9PM
$FREE, open to all ages
Please RSVP to [email protected]

Bug Labs Test Kitchen
598 Broadway, 4th floor
http://www.buglabs.net/about

Build colorful, safe glowing lanterns with LEDs!

We’ll supply: construction materials and tools, bottomless box of light-emitting diodes, soldering help.
You bring: ideas, 9 volt batteries, colorful tissue papers or plastics, transparent jars/jugs/boxes, portable objects you’d like to decorate with lights, colorful blinky toys, etc.

Lantern Festival
Sunday, February 28, 3:30pm-sunset
$FREE, open to all ages
No RSVP necessary

Prospect Park, Brooklyn
Picnic area just north of Picnic House (enter at Prospect Park West and 5th Street)
[park map, google map]
The closest subways are 2/3 at Grand Army Plaza, and F at 7th Av.
If you have trouble finding us, call Ranjit at 646-270-2694.

Bring your handmade lanterns to show off, whether you made them at the workshop or at home! We’ll have hot cider and s’mores ; bring some snacks to share if you like. As it gets dark we’ll parade our lanterns north to Grand Army Plaza.

Please: NO FIRE! Don’t bring any lanterns that use candles, flames, or heat. Electric lamps, LEDs, flashlights, and glow sticks are all good ways to make fire-free lanterns.

I wanted to see what would happen if I put a ceramic (stoneware) dish under the lazzzor. I started with the settings for etching glass, but the laser handbook only recommends raster settings, and I wanted to try vector engraving as well, so I tried a bunch of variations.

In the above image, I rubbed a bit of pencil graphite into the engravings to make them more visible. My favorite vector setting was 100% speed, 50% power (on the 35W Epilog). Slower speed or more power raised an ugly lumpy bead of molten glaze, but 100/50 gave a nice smooth scratch.

For my raster test (lower left in the image), I used the recommended settings for glass at 600dpi: 35% speed, 10% power. It looked just fine so I didn’t try any other settings.

I thought maybe I could melt through the colored glaze to reveal the white ceramic underneath, but that didn’t work.

The zigzag line in the above image was engraved at 75% speed/100% power, and the straight line at 14/100. Neither was able to make a white line through the blue glaze. I was afraid to go any slower, because there was already quite a lot of heat building up. Also, I’m thinking of doing this in bulk to a lot of dishes, so I’m ruling out any technique that goes slowly (and thus costs more).

During my recent trip to Japan, I got a quick look at the endless passages of electronic component vendors in Akihabara. Unfortunately, my traveling companions weren’t nearly nerdy enough to spend hours there with me.