In November 2025, my wife was cast as Detective Benoit Blair for a murder mystery party. I decided to make her a notebook and badge for the part, with the badge featuring our dog and the location where the party would be held.
Designing the badge
I started with police badge references from Google Images and Photoshopped together a rough approximation of what I wanted. And by rough, I mean really rough. I fed that composite into AI to get a cleaner, more cohesive version.
From image to aluminum
I used Bambu MakerLab's Relief Maker to generate a base model from the cleaned image, then cleaned that up in Blender before machining it.
I milled the badge out of aluminum, roughing with flat end mills and cutting the relief with a series of ball end mills. From there, I applied a dark acrylic wash to age the surface, then attached the badge to a flip notebook.
Embossing and stamping the cover
For the cover, I drew a vector design in Illustrator and milled an embossing block from a piece of epoxy. I clamped the notebook cover against the block for a few days, then used the same block as a stamp to add gold paint to the embossed design.
The finished notebook
