My inspiration for this project is "Das Wiesenbuch" by Karl Heinrich Waggerl from 1934. The Austrian author (1897-1973) illustrated this meadow book with silhouettes of plants. First I scanned and laser-cut a few pages from the little book. It worked pretty well. Of course, I then wanted to convert my own plants into silhouettes. Et voilà!

I first had problems with cut-out parts that were blown around and came to rest on areas that had not yet been cut. Which of course were not cut properly because of the extra layer. So I designed a vacuum bed. It's only a prototype, but it works pretty well. It's a simple frame made of wood and a perforated panel made of aluminum. I printed an adapter for my vacuum cleaner and run it on the lowest setting. The parts now stay put, everything is cut out perfectly. See pictures.

Update. My vacuum cleaner is too powerful even on the lowest setting, so I built a variable version of the adapter. See pictures and downloadable stl-file.