A wafer cookie is made up of layers of thin wafer and sweet crème. The wafers used in these cookies have a distinctive waffle pattern and are sometimes covered in chocolate. The iconic pink wafer cookies were first made by William Crawford in Leith, Edinburgh in 1813.
We will be using the wafer cookie form to explore rastering, layering and working with some new materials.
• 1/8” pink, ivory or brown acrylic measuring
approximately 10 x 10”
• Felt or foam of a similar shade to the acrylic
approximately 10 x 10"
• White glue
1. Download and open the wafer_cookie file.
Measure the material you are working with and adjust the artboard of the file to match.
You’ll see that this file consists of 3 rectangles; one blank and 2 with small black squares. This grid pattern for the top and bottom of the wafers will be rastered by the laser cutter. Rastering will carve away these areas of the material surface.
2. Using the artwork for the wafers provided as a starting point, make a second set of wafer layers for a shorter or square wafer cookie. You can do this in a few different ways, one is to use the Pathfinder menu.
To do this, begin by making a box shape over a portion of the cookie that you are looking to keep. Once you have a section of the cookie covered, select the box and the cookie below and click on the Crop tool in the Pathfinder menu.
3. The final step is to add a cut line around the edges of your new wafer shape. Recall that a cut line is indicated with a .01pt RGB Red line.
4. For your final file, ensure that you have one top, one bottom and one middle piece for each wafer that you will be looking to make.
If you are running the file yourself, you can achieve a very wafer-like result by running the raster portion a few times at low speed before cutting out the pieces.
5. Once cut, peel the protective paper off the acrylic and give the acrylic pieces a wash to remove the dust that is created during the rastering process.
6. Cut pieces of foam or felt in the same shapes as your wafer layers and stack them together, using a couple of dots of glue to keep the pieces in place. You can also have these rectangles laser cut.