Don and Margot are our neighbors across the street. My wife, Sheryl, and I have known them for about 7 years, and we've become good friends. Our neighbors, Denise and Cheryl, live next door. We've known them for the same amount of time, and they too are good friends. Until recently, Don and Margot had a dog named Molly. Molly was a Westie, a.k.a. West Highland White Terrier. After 17 years of cherished companionship, due to recent health problems, Don and Molly made the compassionate decision to let Molly go to dog heaven. Naturally, this was a time of sadness for our neighborhood.

Denise and Cheryl decided to honor Molly with the gift of a white rose plant. Don and Margot were so grateful that Margot posted on her Facebook page:

Sheryl and I were so touched by this gesture that we decided that I should make Don and Margot a cutting board. I started with a picture of Molly from one of Margot's Facebook posts.

To use an image with a laser cutter requires that it be converted to a bitmap. So I:

• Converted the color image to grayscale.
• Increased the brightness and contrast of the image.
• Sharpened the image.
• Converted the image to a bitmap and specified a dithering algorithm.

My first attempt was not so successful. Where did Molly go? She looked like a Westie in a snow storm.

So I used the lasso selector to roughly crop out the gray background.

I then reprocessed it to obtain better results:

Not cropping so close actually helped in that it forms an outline of Molly. Sheryl and I were so touched by Don and Margot's poem to Denise and Cheryl that I included the text on the board. I also included an image that I found by googling "white rose clip art."

Here is how it looked on the Epilog laser cutter.

Sheryl and I presented it to Don and Margot, and they were speechless. They were able to regain their composure and post this on Facebook.

Using Autodesk Pier 9 equipment after-hours in this fashion is definitely part of imaging, designing, and creating a better world.

Celebrating man's best friend is alive in the lab.