Ideas
I will be revising some of my original ideas in the final project. I am still very interested in the laser cutter and would love to continue to experiment with cutting a variety of materials using the laser cutter.
Laser Cut Leather Jacket/3D printed buttons
I am interested in exploring additional materials on the laser cutter. I would love to experiment with leather, or wool cut on the laser. I would plan on prototyping both materials and determining which material would work best in the construction of some kind of jacket. I would also draft a 3D model for buttons for the jacket. It could also be a broach, necklace or other piece of corresponding jewelry.
Laser Cut Wooden Brown Stone/3D printed turkey dinner puppet
This is a project that has been in development for some time now. The next step in the build of my tiny theater piece is a house, or brownstone. Inside the brownstone is a thanksgiving dinner and the turkey comes to live and runs around the house. I would build the brownstone by laser cutting wood and piecing layers together. I would draft a 3D model of the turkey dinner and print it out 3–4 times to use in various vignettes within the house. I would also wire the house with LED lighting so individual rooms could be lit one at a time.
Laser Cut wooden facade piece for tiny theater/CNC cut 3D relief pieces
I would love to build more pieces of the tiny theater wooden facade to use in conjunction with the piece I built for our first project. I would like to finish out the facade using similar techniques to keep the piece unified. I think there is a way to build parts of the facade with the laser cutter and carve out parts on the CNC router.
CNC cut puppet head/Laser Cut wooden gears for arm automation of puppet
I would have the head portion of my 3D modeled head sculpted on the CNC router in 2 or more pieces. I would than build a gearing system and use my knowledge of automation to build a kind of rock um sock up robot style puppet with the boxing action.
Laser Cut wooden wave pattern 2.0 this idea needs another element. Maybe some CNC work?
Building of what I learned in the CNC project I would like to further explore the wave project. I would make the work much larger, use high quality wood, and tweak the files to follow a smoother shape. This would be a great opportunity to learn from what I did earlier. I am not sure what can be done outside of the laser cutter but I am sure I could find something.
I decided to make a cloche hat as my final project in this class. I wanted to work with fabric in some way and wool was more reasonable in terms of cost than leather. I also felt like a hat was an achievable product within the given time frame. In order to make the hat I will be using 2D shapes and stitching them together to create the 3D form of a hat. The greatest challenge that I foresee is the file work. Coming up with the pattern will be the biggest challenge that I can see. So I set out to draft and test my work as soon as possible.
I will also 3D print a button for use on the hat. It will be a simple button that will allow me to test the feasibility of 3D printing buttons in the first place. I am worried about the loop or connection point between the button and the garment. I am not sure the 3D printer can be strong enough and small enough to act as a typical button. We will see.
I started my process by building a 3D shape for my hat. I used an existing wooden block used for the stretching and building of a cloche hat. Using chip board I cut and attached a shape to use as the brim of my cloche hat. Once I was satisfied with the shape of my block I took careful measurements and covered the shape with paper.
I drew the pattern on the paper covered hat block. When I was happy with the shape I had created, I took the paper off the block and cut out the pieces. These pieces will need to be cut out with exacting precision to create the rounded shape of a hat. There is a little give in the wool material that I plan to use for this project but the pieces will need to be precise and close fitting.
I redrew the pattern pieces after I had cut them out with paper. I smoothed over some of the edges, and I took careful measurements of each piece to insure that the digital pattern would line up exactly with the original pattern. Once I was satisfied with the pattern I scanned in the pieces so I would have a digital PDF of the shapes.
I uploaded all the pdfs of the paper patterns into illustrator and I traced the lines to create vectors. I had only patterned one half of the hat so what you see represented above are the pieces for only half of the hat. I also created 3 art boards that are representative of the 3 pieces of wool felt that I have to work with. I needed to fit all the pieces within the art boards or I knew I wouldn’t have enough material.
Above is the file work I used for my test cut of the sample wool fabric. I drew out half of the pattern pieces and I used the reflect tool to duplicate the pattern pieces so there would be two of each shape.
There was a little hiccup when I imported my files into the illustrator program in the lab. The labs illustrator version is a little older than mine and wouldn’t read all the art boards in my files. It was an easy fix, I just saved each of my art boards as an individual file and it solved the problem.
Above you can see the 3D model of the button I am working on. I decided to use tinker cad because the program is so easy to use for simple shapes. The shape I am interested in is simple and geometric to pair with the art deco style. It has also been my experience that the more simple block like shapes print in a more solid and stable way. I am hoping to create a piece that is strong enough to survive the use of a button.
I chose to use a much less expensive wool fabric as my test run. The wool was 100% wool but the thickness is less than half of my finished material. This thickness is maybe 1/4" thick, it may be even slightly thinner. So the fabric didn’t hold it’s shape well after being cut but it did provide a suitable test to make sure that the pattern would come together in the end. It also provides a solid example of what settings the lazor cutter would need to be at, and if the material would burn, singe or light on fire. We had no such issues. After using the software suggested settings the fabric cut beautifully.
The vector engraving of the numbers to indicate what pattern piece each shape was was more difficult. The very think material made it difficult to find a setting that wouldn’t cut all the way through the fabric, but will still leave a mark. I got there eventually but it is clear the thicker felt will be more successful with this.
Above you can clearly see the process of joining the pattern pieces. I have chosen to use the sewing machine with a wide zig zag stitch to join the pieces. I have done this for speed. It is my intention to hand sew the finished pieces together to create a more decorative stitch. Speed was more important than beauty in the sample piece.
I have detailed the process of joining all the pieces for future reference. There was a little bit of pulling out stitches to get the correct order of operations. Some joints need to be connected before others can be joined.
There was a reasonable hat made from this process. I discovered that the pattern was a bit large to be stretched on the block. I reduced the size of all pattern pieces by 5% which would have been a huge job if I was drafting the pattern by hand, but in illustrator it was a piece of cake. I also decided that I would like to see more texture in the hat so I modified the pattern to include a few points of overlap. So rather than butting up each piece next to each other the next version will have some overlapping near the brim of the work. It will give the hat more dimension and interest.
Above you can see the modifications to the file work. It is 5% smaller and there are overlaps added. You can see the overlaps in the additional blue line.
I prepped the document in advance to be separate art boards for upload into the lab computer.
I was able to laser cut the final wool using the files listed. I was shocked to find out how much trouble I had transferring the files from my new version of illustrator into the older version on the lab computer. I never would have figured it all out alone. There were masks that needed to be eliminated, it somehow converted to CMYK color, and I had to change the grouping of the various colors to allow me to vector engrave the blue lines rather than raster engrave the blue lines. I tried just allowing the machine to do the raster engraving but it was taking an extremely long time. It took several house to sort out the file work so it would print properly. One the trouble shooting was resolved the actual laser cutting took less than 15 minutes.
I had to do the engraving of the numerical identification marks and the placement lines 3 times on the red fabric until I finally got it right. First it was the raster vs. vector engraving situation, and second it was about the intensity and speed of the cutting. It started the vector engraving making too deep of a cut. It didn’t go all the way through the fabric but it was quite deep. It only effected the red fabric, I was able to correct it for the other pieces. I went back into the fabric and felted the pieces by hand to keep the structural integrity of the fibers. I couldn’t leave the deep cuts on the red fabric alone.
I chose to stitch this item by hand because of my man made vs. hand work interest. I saw this project as a perfect example of how the handmade and the computer drafted could come together to make a beautiful precise product while still maintaining the beauty and elegance of a hand made project. I think the combination of hand sewing, and the beautiful natural wood combine with the precision of laser cutting to make a fine quality hand made hat. While my previous projects are all interesting it hasn’t been until this hat that I feel like my exploration of natural and mechanical finally meet in a truly successful way.
The finished hat took 26 house to stitch together by hand. Typically a wool hat like this would need to be re stretched on a hat block for the wood to make the precise shape of the cloche hat. Because the laser cutter was so precise and the angle of the cut was exactly 90 degrees with no variation the join of the hat came together and formed the perfect shape. You can see in the front view that the wings of the hat flaps can get a bit wide. I may go back in to block that and train the shape a bit more in hopes of keeping the piece more together.
Finally, I got wrapped up in my other final projects and missed my 3D printing appointment. It was absent minded of me. Unfortunately I was not able to make another appointment with the limitations of my scheduled and the very few lap times available for 3D printing.
I was interested in embroidering a label that could be used as a marker on this hat. I did not have time to scheduled a tutorial on the embroidery machine in in the art studio. I was able to design a label in illustrator and have them printed by a textile artist in Chicago. She is a friend and rushed the job very kindly for me to have ready for this project. I am satisfied with this solution in large part because of my difficulty finding time, and scheduling between departments but I am also very happy with the quality of the labels made by my Chicago acquaintance. Her work is much nicer than anything I have seen out of the embroidery machine in the lab.
So turns out I had one more week to keep working on my project. So I was able to add another element. I used the 3D drawing pen. It was kinda cool. I tested a bunch of temps and speeds, none of them worked in 3D well. So I drew a bunch of layers on a curved serface and bound them all together.
Here is the hat with its flower. I don’t know if I like it better with or without the flower but I left it as a pin so I don’t have to decide.
Also below is the tag that I designed and had woven. It looks good. I didn’t realy do the output myself but it was cool to design something and have it made for me. I am far more likely to do the design and hire someone to see it to completion.
