This week has been very stressful! It started off great because the bamboo matts were delivered over the weekend, which meant that I was able to test those out at the very beginning. It was a struggle to figure out how to properly cut the matt without the edges looking messy. I tried two different methods, and eventually realised that the edges look the neatest when they are cut with a wooden board underneath.
I really liked the aesthetic of the bamboo and especially held against the bamboo material I will be using for the wood it looks great. It also supports the packaging to stand up at an angle really well. While I would technically like the box to sit up a little higher, I am still happy with this outcome.
Once that was tested out, I also filmed a couple of shots in the workshop. Since I had planned what I wanted to film beforehand, the actually filming was relatively easy.
However, those were the only two positive events this week. As soon as I started working on a way to incorporate plastic into my bamboo packaging nothing seemed to work. My original idea was to cut my logo out of the bamboo and fill this with some plastic. In theory I imagined that to look great because it does not only visually link the bamboo with the plastic, but also ties in my branding really well.
In practice this idea did not work out at all. It started off with the problem that none of the laser cutters cut wood that is as thick as my bamboo. When I tried to figure out a solution in the workshop, I was told that this was impossible to do with any of the tools or machines that they had.
But I did not want to give up and I rethought about my idea. Instead of having the logo on one side of the box, I could create a button-like oval that could be stuck on the front of the box onto the bamboo matt. Henceforth, I laser cut my logo out of thinner MDF. I kept both the logo and the individual cut out letters. My idea was to create two different types of mould. One would make the lettering stick out and the other one would indent the lettering into the plastic. Again, in theory it worked out great, but in reality, my mould did not work at all!
Rethinking my idea, I used the rest of my cut outs to see if this would work better without creating plaster moulds but instead pressing the plastic into the MDF. Again, this was a total disaster. Nothing seemed to work, and I was not able to get the plastic to properly fill out all the cut outs.
Because I was not sure why the plastic was not properly filling the logo, I had the idea of just manually pressing the plastic into the logos. I assumed that I would be able to apply more local pressure and thus fill out the logo better. In order to try that I went back down to the workshop to talk to Rob about what I could do. He mentioned that I could still laser cut into the wood, but it would not cut all the way through. Chatting to him made me realise that that was probably the best option because I would have my logo cut out, but the inside of my box would still be a neat bamboo surface.
After a bit of fiddling around we managed to get the logo to the depth that I wanted it to be etched into the bamboo.
Since that bit had worked so well, I was optimistic that the rest would work too. After I had melted and pressed the plastic into the wood I quickly realised that this attempt was even worse than before.
I am super frustrated about how this week went. Now at the end of the week I am so frustrated that I will leave it to next week to come up with a solution of how to incorporate plastic into my box. My optimism is very low at this point but I am hoping that next week will be better.