Let me just start by saying that Michael Schur’s show, The Good Place, is the best combination of hilarity and heart that I have ever experienced, and everyone should watch it. To this end, I will keep this post as spoiler-free as possible. Sadly, this makes going into the backstory of my noun choice very limited. I’ll leave my choice at this quote:

“Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it’s there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It’s a wave.

And then it crashes in the shore and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. The wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it’s supposed to be.”

I picked this particular wave because it reminds me of the “Great Wave” painting (which I admittedly first learned about as one of the default Fruit Ninja backgrounds). 

 

I initially ran into some trouble with translating the SVG file to Easel. The way it appeared on Easel was…not quite what I wanted. I ended up fiddling around with it and finding that “cut outside shape path” yielded the best visual results.

My first print turned out okay, but I nicknamed it “Spiky Boi” because the upcut bit left splinters pointing every which way. I switched to a downcut bit and the results were much better:

Post-processing-wise, my vision was to have the two pieces be inverses of one another. One would be blue on wood, and the other would be wood on blue. For blue on wood, I planned to spray the cut piece with blue finish, and then use the orbital sander to remove the most superficial layer so that only the cut parts would be blue; for wood on blue, I colored the wood first and then cut it. However, while using the orbital sander, I actually really liked the weather-worn look of the blue-streaked wood, so I hand-sanded the design part down to minimal blue streaks and let the rest of the wood look like it just came off a wrecked sailboat. Success!

Costs:

• Carvey machining time:
  (cost per hour) * (time per cut) * (# of cuts)
  = $20/hour * (6 minutes = 0.1 hour) * 2 cuts
  = $4
• Labor cost:
  (my labor cost) * (time spent)
  = $15/hour * 2 hours
  = $30
• Material cost:
  2*(scrap wood cost) + (blue spray finish cost)
  = 2 * $5 + $5
  = $15

Total cost: $49