Nice Tea Biscuit
A Nice biscuit is a popular coconut-flavoured tea biscuit. Its thin, rectangular shape with rounded bumps on the edges has become synonymous with the word biscuit. The word “NICE” is imprinted on top in sans-serif capital letters, and sometimes, these biscuits are lightly covered with sugar crystals. While there is no definitive origin of Nice biscuits, there are variations dating back to 1910.
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The Nice tea biscuit form is a simple design that can easily transform into all kinds of different cookies. Here we use it to look at how you can prep a file to cut and linear engrave.
Ingredients
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• 1/8” baltic birch plywood measuring approximately 10 x 10”
Tools
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• 100 grit sand paper, a sanding sponge or nail files
Files
Directions
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1. Download and open a tea_biscuit file.
Measure the material you are working with and adjust the artboard of the file to match.
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Laser cutters execute specific tasks based on vector line colours and fills. You will see that in this file, the outline of the cookie shape appears as a .01pt red line and the word NICE appears in a .1pt black line. The red line indicates what will be cut, the black line indicates what will be linear engraved.
.1pt BLACK
.01pt RED
2. You will see that only two of the four cookies in the provided file have the word NICE that will be linear-engraved on the top. To complete the remaining cookies type out a word in a font you like.
3. While working with the black selection tool (or arrow) go into the Type drop-down menu and select the Create Outlines command. This will change your text into an editable image.
4. Once the text has been changed into a vector chape, change the appearance so that it has no fill and a .1pt black outline. You can review how to adjust line colours here.
5. When you've finalized your design, you are ready to cut or to send your file to be cut. You can see a list of online laser cutting service centres here.
6. Once cut, sand the top surface of the cookie to remove any soot or burn marks. You may also want to lightly round the top edges of your cookie- this is where a sanding sponge or a nail file can come in handy.
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