Valentine's Day Special - leather pendant with engraving

Valentine's Day is THE holiday for personalized gifts. And what better way to personalize things than with the Mr Beam laser cutter? Today I'm going to show you how you can make your partner a beautiful leather pendant with your anniversary engraved, without any graphics program. The perfect gift idea for Valentine's Day.

Create a leather pendant engraving quickly and easily, even with JPG files

You can find the cutting file for the pendant in the example in the Mr Beam Design Store , with square or rounded edges. If you want something simpler, you can use the Quick Shapes in BeamOS to create a heart pendant with a hole, for example. Then make sure the hole is the size of your eyelets. Our file is designed for eyelets with a diameter of 10 mm. Of course you can also use your leather pendant with engraving without a loop, but then it will wear out faster.

Now you need two engravings for the two sides of the pendant. I opted for a name lettering and a calendar page with a heart around the anniversary. The easiest way to engrave the calendar sheet is to simply take a screenshot of the calendar on your PC or laptop. Make sure you are not in dark mode, jump to the appropriate year and take a screenshot of your month.

Simply drag and drop the tag, your screenshot and a heart outline into the workspace. There you can position everything exactly. If you don't have a heart-shaped SVG file, you can also create a Quickform with a coloured cutting line and set the cutting line to Engraving when setting the laser parameters.

The Mr Beam ignores the white areas of your JPG during the laser process and only engraves the black numbers and fonts, as well as your SVG files. So that you can place your heart precisely on your anniversary, it is best to use the zoom on the left side in the Preview tab by moving your mouse over the field and using your mouse wheel. For the lettering with names, you can use the pre-installed fonts of the Mr Beam software or create an SVG file with a different font in a graphics program of your choice (e.g. Illustrator or Indesign). If you choose the second option, remember that your text must be converted into objects before you can engrave it.

Place design for leather tag engraving

When you have finished placing your design, you can start lasering. We recommend taking a special laser faux leather, but animal leather will also work. However, this should be left as untreated as possible. If it is treated, be sure to check our knowledge database to see if it contains ingredients that must not be lasered.

Insert your leather, focus the laser head and click on laser in the software. The correct settings can vary greatly, as different types of leather behave extremely differently. So be sure to try out your parameters on a small piece beforehand. A YouTube tutorial on the topic of laser settings will be available soon. Feel free to check out our channel. Maybe it's already there. For these charms, I chose the default laser faux leather settings and just lowered the intensity of the engraving a bit.

Finishing of the leather pendant

For an optimal result, you can still wash the leather pendant with engraving. To do this, put a little water in a bowl and scrub the engraving with a brush. This will remove any excess particles still attached to your pendant, leaving only the engraved surface. With the laser artificial leather from our shop, this also means that the material becomes a little softer and can be bent even better. When you're done washing, fold your tag and let it dry.

Attachment for the leather tag

It's important that you don't attach your grommets until your engraved leather tag has dried because depending on the quality of your grommet rings, you could risk rusting. For bending, you need an eyelet press or eyelet pliers. Make sure that everything is inserted correctly and that you press with enough force.

Then you attach another key ring to complete the DIY keychain. In addition to the classic ring, these are also available in other forms. Of course, a heart is best for Valentine's Day. If you have trouble bending the key ring apart, you can, for example, slide wide craft tweezers between the layers and then stand them up. This gives you a wide gap, and you can easily thread your work of art.

Finished DIY leather pendant

And your leather tag with engraving is ready. I hope your favourite person will be very happy about this personal gift and wish you a lot of fun lasering. As always, we're happy to see your results with #madewithmrbeam !

By the way, you can also make the right Valentine's card with the Mr Beam. Here you can find out more!

Lots of love for you, not just on Valentine's Day, wishes your Marie. 💘