Garden Party!

I've been working feverishly on a new project: 3D printed garden markers.

I saw this image featured on the Shapeways blog:

And thought to myself, WTF!!!!!

How is that a feature worthy print?  The design is boring (and the print quality is the SUCK).

A garden needs character. That garden says "Meh. I'm here and I can tell you what else is here with me."

While I know we ultimately DON'T want Peter Rabbit and company hanging out in our gardens, we should at least want our garden to be inviting enough for a cast of woodland characters to want to have a tea party amongst our plants. (But then again I imagine Pi has tea parties with the mice that we are trying to run out of the house.)

While my personal garden plot is only 5'x4', I'm utilizing square foot gardening and packing as much in as I can.  I've got a variety of herbs including mint, savory, fennel, sage, garlic, chives, lemon balm and catmint. I've got several types of greens including Swiss chard, kale, spinach and lettuce.  I've got a few larger plants in there too, including zucchini, lemon cucumbers and rhubarb.

My current (and long time) favorite font is called Charlie.

If it looks familiar, it's the font we chose to use for our wedding invitations (a future blog post will be dedicated to the entire wedding stationary and Save the Dates).  It's wonderfully reminiscent of the Arts and Crafts movement and makes me think of the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Here are some of the results.

The last photo includes the Rogue Rabbit Gardens sign made for me by Justin.  It is also printed from PLA (as are all of the markers featured) and has been in my garden since March.

I will have these markers and others available for purchase in the next few days.  Follow my blog for the announcement when they will be available (the announcement will go up on Facebook as well).

I have a few really awesome ideas for garden accessories that I will be working on in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned for those as well!

Sooooo EXCITED to cut paper!

I put M0rt1m3r to work yesterday as soon as he arrived.

I have wedding invitations to get out this week.  Let's just say my printer (who has not been named like all of other other mechanical items) was not cooperating, so I have to go back to the paper store in the morning and get more paper. Luckily, I can use the cards I cut with M0rt1m3r for other purposes since the printer won't cooperate with the size requirements.

Some really cool stuff I found out about M0rt1:  M0rt1 is dual head.  I knew he could draw and cut, but I didn't know he could draw and print at the same time!  Most craft cutters require you to swap out heads from a cutting head to a pen head to draw vs cut.  Not M0rt1!  He switches back and forth between a ballpoint tip and cutting tip flawlessly.  I tested some of the preloaded designs on the SD card provided with him.

Granted the designs are fairly simple, but the bird turned out cute! With other craft cutters, I would have had to try to print the line work, get the page lined back up and then cut after swapping blades. With the e-Craft, it was as simple as selecting the design and letting it print/cut.

I also made Trogdor the Burninator stickers last night.  I had some issues with the page shifting while cutting the second pass (I probably should have used a heavy card stock backer as the sticker paper is considerably thinner than the other paper I've cut so far), but they turned out AWESOME!

First I created the cutting template in Illustrator and saved it as an SVG file (scalable vector graphic - this is what you will import into the e-Craft software to cut from).  I scaled and placed my Trogdor images in Photoshop and printed without the outlines from the template.  I placed the sticker sheet in M0rt1 and hit cut in the e-Craft software.  I set the pressure at 2, trying to just score the paper for a sheet of stickers. That wasn't QUITE enough, so I sent it through again at a pressure of 4, which was too much (it cut clean through).  Also on the second pass, the page skewed (hence the thought I may have needed a card stock backer), which messed up the cuts on the second row. I got six usable stickers from one side.

I'm going to try using manual mode to cut out the rest of the stickers that didn't get messed up (which was only one sticker, but it threw the cut pattern off for the entire thing, so I canceled the print.). 

Unfortunately, I had homework to work on this weekend, so it was a mix of trying out M0rt1 and doing work.  I have to tell you, I wanted to blow it off completely and just cut paper!  I want to blow everything off and cut paper! 

Welcome M0rt1m3r

We welcomed our 3rd robo-child today (as Justin termed it) to the Gnomery today.  M0rt1m3r, my new e-Craft arrived today.

I have wanted a craft cutter FOREVER.  Wedding invites turned out to be the best excuse to get one.  

Here is the unveiling video: 

In addition to cutting it also does "printing" with a pen plotter.  A lot of the other cutters have the ability to do that, but you have to switch out heads.  

Well, not with M0rt1m3r!  He has a dual head (upgrayedd)!  R2-D0nt is also a dual head machine.  This is how we roll in the Gnomery.  

I've done some test cuts and it takes a bit of getting used to (I had pretty good results using 12x12, a few issues with 8.5x11, but moving a paper guide solved the issue).  

I'm getting ready to test print an invitation on cut paper.  I'll let you know how it worked! 

Tinker....... CAD?

I've been playing with TinkerCAD here and there for a few weeks now.  TinkerCAD is a web based 3d modeling application.

It's pretty easy to learn and work with through a series of lessons that lead you step by step through building a model.

There is a limited use, free version (which I had been playing with until last night) and a paid version ($19/mo is the entry level up to $499/mo for enterprise level).

As far as the free use version goes, I was able to make a few things, but not able to save them should I want to make another.  I was able to export the .stl file to print using R2-D0NT, so that was pretty sweet.  If you don't have a 3D printer in your bedroom, they do offer print services through several 3D printing companies. If YOU want to have your object printed, be sure to contact us through MakeXYZ.

While we were working on Save the Dates for our upcoming wedding, we REALLY wanted to send something awesome. Which, of course, meant 3D printed.  While we were playing with ideas, I designed this key chain/tag pretty quickly, especially considering I don't really have any 3D modeling skills (I can draft the heck out 2D images but hadn't really gone too far into 3D work yet).  I have to say it couldn't have been more than 15 minutes of work to make.

We even did a test print of it (I have it hanging on my Alpine Mail Bag) and it was pretty awesome.  What made it most awesome though was the fact that we printed it in Glow in the Dark PLA.  

That was the first project I had created using TinkerCAD exclusively.  There is an option to import 2D .svg files as well as using the shapes provided by TinkerCAD. I had a lot of trouble importing .svg files when I first started using it.  I haven't tried it out in a while though.  Sometimes it would not be able to upload the file at all, while others it would distort the line work, but I'll save that for another post. 

I haven't really been able to test out the new features that have unlocked when switched to a paid account last night.  I'm planning to spend a bit of time each day checking it out and really evaluating the free v. paid features.  I'll also eventually compare it to software such as Autodesk Inventor. 

A few things that have me excited about TinkerCAD (even right away) are the simplicity and accessibility of it.  You can be up and creating relatively quickly through playing with it and the tutorials. It's simplicity can get anyone designing in no time.  I'll have my mom test that out.  That should be interesting.  Maybe she'll fall in love with 3D design and printing. 

TinkerCAD is web based, so you can pretty much work anywhere you have access to a browser that supports WebGL. Browsers that play nice with TinkerCAD are Chrome 10 or newer and Firefox 4 or newer.  

Think about how great that is for just a minute.  Not only can someone with no experience in 3D design get their feet wet, but you can work anywhere you have web access and a browser with WebGL support.  Your software isn't tying you to your computer any longer.