La Fille en Rose . . . . . . Fed-Mar 2024

     I was back in New York from my semester abroad. I hadn't seen a good friend for months. In class I was given a 12x12 inch piece of wood to CNC mill into and make a sign with, a large piece of material I knew I wouldn't want to keep around. If I had to make a sign though, I wanted there to be wordplay. And my friend presented the solution.

     She has a tattoo of the saying, "La vie en rose." A small word change there and I could make the phrase to be about her while still retaining a similar sound: La fille en rose. I anticipated the work in Fusion 360 to be straightforward given that I'd just be extruding down some text. But I was sorely proven wrong. Cursive fonts do NOT play nice with being extruded, often only extruding certain letters or parts of letters or simply throwing back red error messages in refusal. My hypothesis for this is that fonts, particularly those in cursive, are not drawn or created in a way conducive to the way Fusion 360's extrude tool works with their overlapping lines and odd shapes. I was convinced that I would have to digitally hand draw the words as an SVG to get my way, something I was stubbornly opposed to submitting to. But, after HOURS of scouring the web for a compatible, lookalike font, I found better grade.

      I could finally move onto the step that would make this sign stand out from the others in class: a signature shade of pink. Painting before milling would ensure that there would be a clean contrast between the paint and exposed wood. The thin nature of the cursive font dictated that it had to be milled using an engraving bit rather than a normal one, increasing the fabrication time. That along with me overestimating how deep the cut should be resulted in this step taking over three hours on its own. I also made the decision to round off the corners and give it a softer look in response to drill holes having been there to hold it down during milling. Hooks were added to the top to allow the sign to be hung. 

      After all that effort, I went on to gift the sign to my friend. The goal of the assignment was to elicit a response from hanging it up somewhere. And so the sign lives on as another piece in the pink girl’s collection.