DE/CONSTUCT - Laser Cutter

Our second day of class found us in the fab-lab, a place that usually makes me break out in stress hives- but not today!

Today our group, Holli, Ben and I focused on manipulating our fabric with the laser cutter. After our introduction to the laser cutter I remembered kerfing wood in the Digital Fabrication Lvl 100 paper so I found the kerfing designs on the Instructables website and made some Illustrator samples for us to test out.

The first kerfing example we tried out was a simple netting pattern, but we became very interested in the outcome and decided to do a number of different examples, all with varying results.

Some had more stretch than others, some were decidedly more decorative than others, however two issues crossed my mind after the experiment was concluded:

1. Although these designs were very effective in transforming the fabric from solid to pattern, how effective would this be for a garment? For example, how strong would it be?

2. Would the burnt hair smell, that was created by applying heat to a protein, ever go away? It is pretty unsavory...

This was a happy accident when one of us accidentally changed the laser settings from cut to rasterise- we thought we would let it play out and see what happens. Not a lot in the end, as the rasterised line just rubbed off- although this could be a settings issue and we could go back in and have a play with this at a later stage.

The above image shows the settings that was pre-set for 3mm felt on the laser cutter.

Our last experiment was rasterising on some light denim, which had some very unexpected results! Originally we tried to use the pre-set settings for light denim and nothing at all was showing up on the fabric. After some discussion with Leo, and some failed testing we decided to turn the heat up and slow the laser down (25% power and 75% speed) and the above image eventually appeared on the fabric! No idea why it is brown, could be the age of the cotton denim perhaps?