DIY on the cheap free
Our digital fabric printing friends, Spoonflower, are having a 24 hour FREE swatch day.
Get a free swatch of your own design printed on any of their 8 fabrics, or order an indie design from the Spoonflower marketplace. Shipping is also free to anyone, anywhere!
When you order your free swatch, you can also choose to a make a $5 donation to Heifer International.
Get all the details on Spoonflower’s free swatch day HERE.
Reed tools and miniature weaving looms with Spoonflower and Ponoko
Andy and Becka Rahn have been dabbling with Ponoko service since 2008. Becka was curious about designing puzzles, and Andy who is a software engineer couldn’t pass the geek aspect of laser cutting his own designs. The day Ponoko crossed his computer screen, he started designing his first project.
An art and fiber teacher, Becka decided to make tiny textile tools as holiday ornaments. She knew of plenty of people who would find miniature weaving looms irresistible. Andy started with designing reed tools for his oboe, as he found that he was in need of a gizmo to help with the meticulous job of creating reeds for the instrument. The couple are currently working together on a DIY mini frame loom for weaving enthusiasts.
Both Andy and Becka love working with bamboo and acrylic. The bamboo is a favourite for its natural finish and feel as well as strength, and the acrylic colors are always an inspiration for fun, vibrant projects. Becka combines the lasercut pieces with Spoonflower printed fabrics that she also designs. This means that she has ultimate control over every step of the design process, enabling her to create highly individualised ornaments.
In the past, these handmade fans approached making very differently, sticking to their traditional hobby tools and techniques. Andy found the transition to digifabbing especially natural, as he was already familiar with digital design tools. Becka found the new design possibilities exciting and inspirational, and she loves the “whole new level of cool to the materials” that she now has available to her
More from the couple under the cut:
Contest ends June 30th
UPDATE: Thanks so much for entering our Sponnflower fabric giveaway. The contest is now closed and winners will be notified and announced very soon!
This month the Ponoko blog has partnered with digi fabric printers Spoonflower to give away a free yard of printed fabric to 5 winners.
Spoonflower lets you upload your own design, choose a fabric, and get your design professionally printed on to fabric.
They’ve been digitally printing fabric for the masses since 2008, and the Spoonflower marketplace is the largest collection of independent fabric designs in the world.
Spoonflower can digitally print on 7 different kinds of fabric, and winners of our blog giveaway can choose whichever fabric they like.
How would you use digitally printed fabric from Spoonflower in a Personal Factory project?
How to enter:
To enter the giveaway, leave a comment telling us how you would use digitally printed fabric from Spoonflower in a Personal Factory project.
Think about how you would combine your own textile design with your own design for 3D printing; CNC routing; or laser cutting. Or all three!
Before there were inkjets, at the dawn of digital art…
Having developed a career as a video artist and painter, Anton Perich was earning his keep working for Andy Warhol when he had a vision of the future.
I dreamed of a machine that would paint. No more hand made paintings, but machine made, with sharp electric lines, on and off, like Morse code, short and long.
It was in the late 1970s that this dream became a reality. The components for the painting machine were all sourced or salvaged from local bargain stores in the famous Canal Street strip in NY.
Consisting of an array of photocells wired to airbrushes and then mounted on a motorized scanning unit, Anton’s contraption would have earned him some serious cred even amongst today’s hardcore hackers.
Click through for a video that shows the Electric Painting Machine in action, as projected images are transferred onto giant canvasses. (more…)
What do preserves and digifabbing have in common?
Last Saturday’s Craft2.0 fair had Ponoko smeared all over it. Sticky, sweet and delicious, where the former and the latter aptly describe the JamOff jam making competition, while the middle is just as appropriate for the featured designs. Chromatophobic, Freestylen and Super Very proudly displayed their allegiance to Ponoko in form of banners, which attracted many questions from the public.
Keep reading…
digital adventures in contemporary craft
Lab Craft is an exhibition featuring 26 makers who combine their artistic vision and manual skills “with cutting-edge digital technologies such as rapid prototyping, laser cutting, laser scanning and digital printing.”
Curated by Max Fraser for the UK’s Crafts Council, the exhibition showcases work from several makers previously featured here on the blog including Gareth Neal, Geoffrey Mann, Liam Hopkins, Lynne MacLachlan, and Tord Boontje.
My favorite piece in the show is Shine by Geoffrey Mann. This piece is the result of 3D scanning a Victorian candelabra and 3D printing the scanned information in silver plated bronze. The scanner being unable to distinguish the actual surface of the object from the reflections produces spikes which vary with the intensity of the reflection.
the Spring/Summer 2011 collection from Charlotte Linton
Traditional fabric printing involves a limited color palette. Whether it’s block printing or screen printing, more colors always means more cost.
One of the greatest thing about digital textile printing is that designs can have unlimited colors at the same cost as a single color. Yet designers using digital fabric printing still cling to flat designs with a few, flat colors.
Let Charlotte Linton show you how it’s done.
above: Mineralogy
cotton schmotton
On-demand digital textile printers Spoonflower announced today the addition of silk to their printable fabrics! Crepe de chine, to be specific.
Crepe de chine is a 100% silk with a slightly bumpy texture. (It’s not the ultra shiny stuff; that’s silk charmeuse.) The addition of crepe de chine silk makes six fabric choices including quilting cotton, organic sateen, organic knit, upholstery twill, linen-cotton blend canvas, and cotton lawn.
And don’t forget, you can sell your original silk textiles in the Spoonflower shop.
Printing on fabric with an inkjet.
Craft posted an interesting article about fabric printing using an inket printer. We have previously mentioned services that will custom print fabric for you and a way to convert an inkjet into a t-shirt printer, but I haven’t seen anyone print fabric with an unmodified home printer before. The key point seems to be the type of ink your printer uses.
Printing your own fabric is not as difficult as it sounds, and you don’t need any special equipment to get started. The only secret to a successful print is to make sure that you have the right type of ink. Cheap printer cartridges and refills often use a dye based ink that colors unpredictably on fabric, and may even wash out completely in water.
More expensive printer cartridges use pigment ink. Pigment ink is color-fast on a many of different surfaces, and is much more useful for printing on fabric.
Of course, this is definitely not a manufacturer-recommended use of your printer, so there’s some risk you may damage your printer. Try this with caution. If you still want to brave this new frontier of home printing, be sure to read the rest of the article.
You also might find the previously mentioned article on making a t-shirt printer useful. It includes a section on choosing the right kind of printer.
Via Make
six spring collections of digitally printed textiles + the awful loss of Alexander McQueen
Fashion was my first design-love, and Alexander McQueen was my first designer crush. His collections were ceaselessly astonishing and their presentation always a work of performance art. (I remember reading in Vogue how McQueen held his fashion show on a pier during a hurricane. It was one of those brilliant and sinister moves that makes you fall instantly in love with a troublemaker.)
As a nod to the late and great Lee Alexander McQueen, here’s a look at the Digital Print Storm that took the Spring 2010 fashion runways. While the “Enfant Terrible” pushed the look to extra-terrestrial limits, Basso&Brooke as well as Mary Katrantzou delivered bright CGI graphics that still cling to the 80’s trend of recent springs. Elie Saab followed suit with digitally printed splatter paint in neon colors. And Nathan Jenden and Prada chose to go photo-real.
Peruse the Digitally Printed Fashion Revolution after the jump.
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