I was looking around at some old Japanese patterns for inspiration and was a bit entranced by one I found that seems to be called asanoha. I’d definitely seen it before on different things and decided to see if I could come up with a good rendition of it for the laser. I started with a hexagon and then made some additional lines to section it up.

after that I traced out the triangles I wanted to work with as separate objects (green).

Then I took those and did an offset path (blue) and tiled it around to get the repeating pattern.

I kept the green lines in the file for now because it made it easy to snap to when copying the tiles, but set their object to ignore and just cut out the blue lines. This resulted in many tiny triangles in my tray

I love the way the pattern turned out in the end and can think of a few ways it would be fun to use in something like a lantern/lamp shade, a privacy screen or even just embellishing cards or stationary.

I think a couple of the cutouts blew in front of the laser preventing a couple of the triangles to cut properly so you’ll see they’re still attached. One of the tricky parts of working with lightweight material like cardstock