I first went into EDS for shop training, which included a how-to on using both the lasercutters and vinylcutters at EDS (thank you, Anthony).
Grouped with the others in the same training session, we sort of played around with the lasercutter's settings until we were able to get decent cuts in the cardboard.
I wasn't sure at first what would be good to make, but I finally settled on printing a cute design that my sister recently drew (a wrestling MIT beaver). After requesting the image, I took the original illustration into inkscape to be made into a vector trace.
After spending a bit too much time playing with the Trace Bitmap functionality (I was inspired to try this after seeing Rinh's page), I decided to manually trace the image myself, then thickened the traced lines and convert the trace to a path, something that the vinylcutter could actually cut out.
What I really had in mind was something cute, like this sticker on my mother's mug, and though I know the thin strips would make weeding hard, I still wanted to try to get a similar sticker, but this time even more personalized. I knew I also had the option of using transfer paper to make it easier, but ended up just not doing so (kind of slipped my mind).
I definitely spent way too much time thinking on this one. My original idea was to try to make something bendy (for the "extra credit") by making a bunch of scoring so that one part could be folded over, but then I had a difficult time figuring out how to incorporate that into somthing that could be rearranged in multiple ways.
It was already Tuesday, and I still hadn't thought of a good way to do this, so I definitely rushed it, but I decided something that was rearrangeable would be a board with slots to stick in little cutout people. That way I could put it into multiple configurations, technically speaking.
I cut everything out in one go (and it's a good thing I did--it took a lot longer than anticipated), and then I assembled; however, I was disappointed to find it was somewhat difficult to actually fit the little people into their slots, so I semi-cheated and cut off a little bit off of each of their little tabs (though it made some of the fits now too loose).