Leaves Falling

For this piece i used a piece of Reclaimed Barn Wood Pine. The first step is to pick out a flat piece of wood, or flatten at least one side if needed. I used the table saw and miter saw to cut the piece to 10" square and 1" thick. I then sanded with 60, 150, and 220 grit sandpaper. Once sanded i applied a dark stain, special walnut in this case to the board. Doing this now will save the hassle of applying stain to small parts of the carve. The trick is to put a light coating on the piece so the stain does not penetrate too deeply into the wood pores.

If you have Vcarve you can use it to trace an image of your choosing and export it as an SVG. This vector can then be Imported into easel. If just using easel you can use one of the stock images or may even be able to find one online.

Open a new project in easel. First thing to do is to set the project dimensions, 10"x 10"x 1" in this case. Set your bit size and feed rates, I just used the recommended rates for this piece. Import the SVG you made in vcarve, or which ever image you may want to use. Once it is imported you should set the cut as a fill, for the time being leave it to cut full depth.(Won’t be able to see it if you change it to ‘0’ depth now) You can now create and design the layout how you want. I simply re-sized, copied, pasted and rotated the leaf. Once your layout is how you like it, select all objects and set the cut depth to 0". You will not be able to see the pieces anymore, but they are still there. Next you will need to create the box that will become the pocket. Use the easel command to create a box that is centered on the piece and will leave 1/2" border around the objects. In this case center is X-5" Y-5" size of square is 9", 9". Set the cut depth of the box to .0325. You can go deeper if you choose but it will take much longer to cut. Now select the box you just made and from the edit pull down choose ‘send to back’, your leaves should now appear. Once your design set send to the machine and begin carving.

Note:
You may get a warning that the bit is too large. I chose to ignore this as using a smaller bit would require slower cut and feed rates, thus needing much longer to cut.