Had the #Cricut humming tonight! Middle child loves Epic: The Musical, so we collaborated on this sweet hoodie. They drew the art in Procreate on their iPad and I traced and tweaked the images in Inkscape before bringing them into Cricut Design Space. This uses an iridescent gold foil heat-transfer vinyl. I love the look so much. I only sort of burned myself once! And only accidentally ruined one piece of vinyl. (I'm gonna blame Design Space for that, though.) We're learning!
I am starting to understand why people get kind of obsessed with these things...
#maker #crafts #vinylcutter #EpicTheMusical #MakerDad #Inkscape
#TRONtober prep continues with a return to the child-sized identity disc! With the ring light successfully test fit in the disc and the battery pack design validated, the next step was to find a way to fit the control board into the disc. That required a bit of figuring out how to actually make that happen, as there really isn't much room left in the disc. Also, I didn't want it to be super conspicuous. But I found space on the bottom of the disc. These buttons will lay flush with the top of the disc and sit right on the switches for the control board, meaning I don't need to worry about springs or anything. I'll just need to make sure they travel freely enough that they don't get stuck after being pressed.
#maker #3Ddesign #3Dprinting #makerdad #Halloween #Halloween2025
Today's #maker task: confirm the sizing on the pattern for my kiddo's #TRON Halloween costume!
We did the usual pattern-making thing of wrapping her in plastic wrap and then taping over it, then drawing a rough pattern on the tape, laying out where the light lines will go. (Some of the shapes will not transfer to her, simply because she's, you know, 5 years old, and Olivia Wilde was a whole adult woman and the proportions are not the same.)
Then I added cuts for darts so that the pattern would lay flat and photographed the pattern with some rulers for reference. I brought the photos into #Inkscape where I scaled them to actual size, then separated each piece using clipping masks so I could straighten everything separately.
I used the pen tool to trace half of each chest/back piece and make them symmetrical, and then laid out the light lines. Lots of simple lines that I then added strokes to, then converted those strokes to paths. Added some minor detailing but didn't go crazy because the sizing is still subject to change. Before saving as a PDF for printing, I did a pass with the Measure tool to make sure all the pieces that needed to attach together were more or less the same size (e.g. within half a millimetre or so) and that the light lines were spaced correctly on those pieces.
I printed the revised patterns last night and we'll assemble them for a fit test this morning!
Twoowls Elt 🦉 🦉
Trevor