On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me - a My Neighbor Totoro Christmas ornament!

Wanting another geeky ornament to liven up my Christmas tree, I took a scene from the classic movie My Neighbor Totoro and cut out a layered ornament.

Here's how I put it together:

Supplies

Materials that I used: (with affiliate links)

Glittered stiff felt - https://amzn.to/346it2P

Tools that I used:

K40 laser cutter - https://amzn.to/2sKq0aB

Hot glue gun - https://amzn.to/38nKmqK

Step 1: Designing the Ornament

I brought a picture from My Neighbor Totoro into Inkscape and used the 'trace bitmap' function to create a vector. Cleaning up the image, I duplicated it 3 times.

For the background layer I simply made a circle, scaled to the same size as the other two layers.

For the middle layer I cleaned up the small portions that would be too detailed to cut, and added a notch at the top for the ornament hook.

For the front layer, I took out the characters and again cleaned up some of the smaller portions that would be too detailed to cut.

Step 2: Cutting the Layers Out

I went through my packet of stiff felt and chose white felt as the background layer, black as the middle, and gold as the foreground layer.

I placed each layer in the laser cutter, then pulled up the corresponding layer in my laser cutter software (K40 whisperer) then vector cut each layer.

Your laser cutter may be different, but I ran this on 10 mm/s speed and 5 power. Any slower or higher speed had a tendency to light the felt on fire.

Step 3: Gluing the Layers Together

I took some hot glue and started gluing the layers together. I made the decision to flip the middle layer around to show the backside instead of the glitter side - I did this to have more of a contrast between the unglittered felt and the two glittered layers.

This was just a last minute choice, but not necessary by any means.