My wife and I have been talking about putting up a photo collage in the upstairs hallway of our new house, but we haven’t had time to work on it yet. I decided to help us get it started, as part of a Christmas gift this year.

My daughter and I made a trip to IKEA and picked up a few VIRSERUM picture frames in off-white, for $3-$5 each. I would have preferred pure white, but it should look fine in a hallway that’s currently painted tan. The important thing is that these frames have a wide, flat frame.

I then took the frames to the laser room at NextFab for custom engraving. I’m no Adobe Illustrator expert, so I had to play around with it a little before I was able to export a file usable by the Trotec 300. I also had to cut an alignment jig using corrugated cardboard, which took up a lot of time for something that ended up discarded.

Here’s a shot of the larger one mid-burn.

And a photo of one of the smaller ones, completed.