I used the pen tool on Illustrator to bring the likeness of three friends to vinyl, and made enough copies to share with them. Their reactions were as expected and hoped for (see below), mostly confused. There were not many setbacks except took a few tries to get the vinyl cutter to work as desired by adjusting the wheels and the pressure. One unforseen setback is the overwhelming number of friends who now expect me to make the same for them AHH.
A (not quite finished) candle-powered spinning light show (looks cool w/ movement but video file not working). Something got lost while adjusting parameters in fusion and all the dimensions were off, and, after a long week to night to early Wednesday morning, decided to leave it as is for this week. The biggest lesson I learned was to manage my time better.
The biggest setback was having limited access to laser cutter (no access over the weekend then everyone using it the following evenings) so very limited oportunities to iterate. The structural mistakes that I would fix given more time: 1. wing base too thick so could not all fit into their slots (pictures show every other wing resting on a fixed one), 2. the braces did not scale with the parameter change for some reason, so the moving center did not quite fit inside the static frame, so I would just change the shape of the brace to be more open at the top and 3. need something to clip the light door closed for maximum lightshow effect.