I have a friend that’s expecting and she’s put together a nursery with a stars and clouds theme. I’ve made a small gift basket for her, but wanted to add something special. I decided on an LED night light to sit on the dresser. It gives off enough light that it should illuminate the room, but not disturb a sleeping baby.
I’m happy to share a tutorial on how I designed and created it using my Glowforge and Silhouette Studio Business Edition.
Supplies
Tutorial: LED Nightlight
- Purchase the hand lettered ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’ SVG cut file at this link on Etsy. Download it and open the SVG in Silhouette Studio Designer or Business Edition. Resize it. I resized it to 5″ wide.
- Draw a rectangle for the tab. This tab will sit inside of the LED nightlight base. The tab on the nightlight base that I bought is 3″ wide and about .5″ deep. I sized my rectangle at 3″ by .5″.
- Create a circle using the ‘Draw an ellipse’ tool. Copy and paste the circle all over the text. Make sure that all of the circles overlap as shown below. (Note: In the second screenshot below, I moved the text so that you could see exactly how to circles all overlapped each other.)
- Select all the circles and the rectangle tab (hold down the ‘Shift’ key while clicking each one). Right click, then ‘Weld’. This turns all the circles into one solid shape that (hopefully!) looks like a cloud.
- Using ‘Flexishapes’ on the left hand side, sprinkle some stars and dots around the cloud, away from the text.
- Color code the design so that it is ready for the Glowforge. In this example, everything in black will engrave while the blue outline will cut.
- Set the Glowforge to first engrave, then cut the acrylic. (The Glowforge starts with the top layer on the left hand side and works its way down.) It’s a best practice to do any engraving before cutting. If you cut first, it is possible that the cut project might move slightly during engraving. Although I didn’t use Proofgrade materials in this project, the Proofgrade settings for ‘Medium Clear Acrylic’ worked perfectly.
Project Variations
There are so many designs that would look great in an acrylic night light/lamp. Also, instead of engraving the design – consider scoring it for a different look!
Like this project? Save an image from below to Pinterest.