My most fond memories are of Summer-time. I am a huge advocate of camping, swimming, and boating. Luckily enough, this is what every weekend consisted of during my entire school career. I even took my first job as a State Park attendant near the campgrounds where my tent was regularly set-up.
I have my father to thank for teaching me all the ins-and-outs of boating. It’s a huge part of who I am and what I love. For Father’s Day last year, I decided to share with him a piece of that. Creating a simple cut-out of glass that matched the outline of the boat I grew up on was super easy on the WAZER.
I wanted as simple of a piece as possible, so I broke it down into three parts. Using a reference picture, I was able to manually trace the outline of the boat, window, and side graphic using Inkscape.
With the design aspects captured, I then had to envision exactly how I was going to assemble this. My original gift idea was always something in a picture frame, so I would use that as my background and foundation to hold the pieces. Afterwards, how would I handle each of the three pieces fitting together?
Windows - Not knowing what would look good, I decided to leave this as a simple cut-out piece and not fill it in. This was my lazy and unimaginative way of dealing with this piece 
Side Graphic - This is where I wanted things to align near perfectly. I did not want to apply any bonding agent between the two glass pieces, I simply wanted them to press fit together like a puzzle piece. This was going to be difficult due to the shape of the graphic.
My first attempt at the cut resulted in a complete failure of the two pieces laying flush together. The inlay was way too large, and simply sat on top of the boat. I was happy with the results, but it didn’t achieve my goal.
Luckily I was able to manipulate some of the WAM features to create an inlay that fit flush with the pieces after about 2 attempts.
I had separated the cuts into two different jobs - 1 for the outside edge and graphic cut-out, with another job for the graphic inlay. Using the WAZER kerf to my advantage, I was able to cut the boat along the center-line cut-path while also bringing it’s scale up by about 6%.
I then took the inlay job and cut it center-line as well. This would essentially give me a single kerf width of edge taken off the sides.
A few more inlay cuts later, and I had my puzzle!
I was so happy with the way the final pieces came together in the picture frame, I ended up making a 2nd piece (with a turn around that was much faster).
I gave one frame to my father and the 2nd frame sits at my desk at work.
Perhaps this year I can open up my imagination a bit more and take a look into glass bonding in order to create a much more holistic version. I had the idea to add water/waves, background islands, etc. during this iteration but needed to keep it simple for times sake. I am still very happy with the results, but I imagine I can put together a more complex glass piece as my next project. It’s been a great learning experience and confidence boost!