This week I set out to make vinyl stickers to label my notebooks, and a cardboard stool inspired by Japanese joinery in traditional furniture making. For the vinyl cutting, I made the files in Adobe Illustrator and then sent them to cut on my desktop mini Cricut cutting machine. This machine works great for very small details, so I opted for using it instead of the Roland cutter in the architecture shop.

For the laser cutting, I set myself the challenge of making a small stool that could hold the weight of a person, built only out of two sheets of cardboard and using no glue or other adhesive. I started in Rhino, laying out the pieces I would need to cut and sizing them until they fit onto the two sheets of 24" x 36" cardboard. Then I laser cut the sheets and began to fold the flat pieces into the beams and columns of the stool.

Below you can see how I used cardboard shims to tighten the fit of my larger joints, similar to wood shims in traditional Japanese furniture practices.

The final stool assembled successfully held up without glue and was most definitely strong enough to hold a person, as demonstrated in class!