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.