THURSDAY CLASS WEEK 2 - Further Sampling with the Vinyl Cutter

For my wearable outcome for this week I thought I would make the sleeves for the jacket that I am making. Holli gave me the idea of using the vinyl cutter to draw chess pieces onto some checkered fabric from a dress that I decided to deconstruct.

I thought it would be pretty easy to do, but boy was I wrong! It took a fair amount of time to get the design printed as I needed to reset the origin for each image that I printed. I also needed to alter the PNGs that I downloaded from the open-source flaticon website, as the image was not printing the bottom line to begin with- the problem was that the image size itself was too small- but this took quite a few frustrating iterations to figure out! I got there in the end.

I achieved the above by sewing the fabric onto a piece of card, however it was not without issues. The sensors kept jamming when it got to the top edge of the garment, and it was very difficult to set the origin to the correct spot each and every time. I don't mind the imperfections though, I think they give the piece character!

I will cut this out next week, once I have finished laser cutting the bodice of the jacket. I have made some extra headway with the shape of the jacket, using the zero waste pattern block that we created on Monday. I hope to join the pieces using the insertion seam I tried in week one. I have booked the laser cutter on Monday afternoon so i will laser cut a design out of the back of the garment, and with these pieces I will hopefully use the digital embroidery machine to attach these to the other sleeve. Fingers crossed this all works out!