DE / CONSTRUCT - Vinyl Cutter

Week 2's fab lab adventure saw our group having a play around with the vinyl cutter. I must admit that I judged this machine by its name and found myself not excited about it, as I felt I has already used a cutter the previous week. I was soon proven wrong as Craig from the fab lab explained that this piece of equipment was easily his favorite in the fab lab because of its "hackability." Instantly I was pretty excited.

The Vinyl cutters primary purpose is to interpret PNG or SVG files to cut Vinyl. The blade swivels so it can cut intricate patterns out, and as it doesn't use heat it is safer to use than the laser cutter. Craig explained that Leo had 3D printed an attachment that allowed the machine to have pens slide into the attachment arm, so the same process could be used for drawing on surfaces. When it came to sample time, our group thought we would trial out the drawing attachment with some clear PVC I found in the fashion sample bin.

First of all it wouldn't register the material correctly and we were all very confused until Craig came over and figured out that the sensors couldn't sense the material as it was see-through, so we fixed this obstacle by taping the underside of the fabric with masking tape, as you can see in the above picture.

We ended up printing out a tiny street map of Wellington on the clear PVC. I really enjoyed the intricate lines that it was able to achieve, in a really short amount of time in comparison to screen printing or digital printing.

After this point we thought we could try and cut a simple image out of the PVC using the vinyl cutter however this didn't work at all- the cutter completely jammed.

After this point we thought we would draw the same image onto white cotton fabric, with a finer pen and I was very intrigued by the result.

I had deconstructed a black and white checkered linen cotton blend dress for this weeks project. Inspired by the fine lines that this machine has the ability to achieve, I decided to use some open-source icons from Flaticon and use the PNGs as a design feature on the fabric. Holli suggested I use chess pieces as it looks like a chess board. I downloaded the following files:

My first attempt was quite fun, although I found the sharpie pen bleed into the fabric, and would eventually wash out. I looked online and found you could buy laundry markers, which were specifically made to not bleed or wash out. This will be my next set of tests.