IDLE HANDS

A few days a go I bought a litte machine that cuts things. What’s special about this one is that it’s sort of like a breed between a CNC machine and a printer. It’s nice. A computer controlled knife.

My main thought was to use it to cut stencils for t-shirt prints and the such and just ignore the ready made materials the same company produces, more on this later.

The machine I got is pink. That’s nice. I think they are trying to dominate the whole scrap booking community. I’m not a scrapbooker, far from it.

There are a few setbacks thogh. 1 you need to change “caps” on the knife to set a maximum depth. 1,2 and 3mm are the ones you can choose. In the printing program it tells you what cap to put on. I often forget this. You also need to have most materials on a piece of mildly adhesive plastic sheet called “carrier sheet”. The carrier sheet helps out in the way that the cut out parts stick in place. But it get’s cut through and the glue dries away etc, so you need to exchange it.

The materials that the same company produces are real great though. I bought black vinyl and white vinyl and brown heat transfer for fabric (t-shirt’s).

So If you do something like this

1: Google some nice black and white images of the comic book heroine Vampirella

2: Get it into Inkscape and convert it to a path.

3: Export it to dxf that the machines accompanying program can read, thank you Inkscape for providing this.

4: Open it into the program, which is really good, to open inkscape files in and set the printer up. If you are able to do something cool in this program I salute you!

5: Print, remove the part’s that should not be there and iron on to your t-shirt.

Pretty Nice result’s.

I’ve used this machine on the Longboard from last post both with Vinyl and as cutout for the stencil.

Am I happy with this machine for 1890:- SEK? I am indeed!