Some time ago, I took a photo of a skull set into a wall in the catacombs under Paris. In this underground ossuary are interred many forgotten French soldiers and plague victims, their identities lost to time.

With some adjustments, I was able to get it suitable for laser engraving.

I wanted to try a technique Jennifer Huber shared on the Glowforge forum recently.

I treated a T-shirt with heat-activated dye discharge paste.

After it dried, I used a tray replacement developed by Bailey Heyman to load it in the laser so I could engrave the design to activate the dye discharge paste.

Washing the paste out took some work. I used synthrapol, a specialized detergent that keeps dye from re-depositing on textiles. It took about a dozen rinse cycles to get it clean.

The lighter-colored stripe is likely an artifact from the Glowforge UI resizing the image when I exported at 72 instead of 96 DPI.

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