The Mimaki Tx2-1600 is just one of the many digital textile printers on the market, but the one I have had the most experience with. Before I get into how it works, here’s a very brief description and history of textile printing from The Colour Museum.
Basically, the image must be divided by color, and every part of the image that is a particular color will be burned into a screen. This must be done for each color to be printed. For those of you in the graphic design field, it can be compared to a separate screen created for each spot color. Thus for every color in a textile, the amount of labor and cost go up - which can be a big limitation for independent designers.
Inkjet printing brought the ability to put a color image on paper to the masses, and the same is happening with digital fabric printing. In the case of fabric, the printing is done with dyes not inks. And because the image is comprised of pixels, there is no limit to the amount of color. It is essentially CMYK, four color process with capabilities for four extra colors.
Before printing the printer must be set up and tested. There are two different sides of dye cartridge slots. This is because fiber reactive dyes are best for cellulosic or plant based fibers such as cotton, rayon, linen or hemp. Acid dyes are best for protein based fibers like wool and silk and for synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester. Plastic gallon containers hold the excess dye from the printing process.
Next, the fabric bolt is put onto the printer. Specially coated and paper-backed fabric that comes on a roll is first placed at the foot of the printer between two plastic ends that support the roll. In order to make sure that the fabric is aligned evenly, the edge of the paper lines up with a triangle on the printer. There is a laser that detects the edge of the fabric and keeps it aligned throughout the printing. This laser is adjusted by a switch on a box attached to the bottom of the printer. The fabric is then carefully pulled in an over-under fashion through 3 cylinders to maintain the tension and then fed through the top and clamped down.
As the 10-Day Jewelry Design Challenge kicks in, we’ve been seeing some great designs coming in already! One thing we want to do is make sure that everyone has a great experience in making their designs and even better, showing them off the best they can. It’s kind of anti-climactic if you’ve got some beautiful jewelry you’ve worked hard on to share but end up with photos that just don’t do it justice. So we thought we’d share some tips on how to best photograph your jewelry creations.
*A photo of the jewelry on a plain background. It may also be good to have it from a few angles:
*A photo of the jewelry on a person. This will give us context for the design.
*Try avoid using the flash as this will wash out the photo.
*Use a tripod if possible and lots of natural light will give them the most accurate colors.
Here are some links that give some awesome advice on photographing products:
While I’ve written quite a bit about Inkscape recently, that’s not to say that Illustrator isn’t popular around here in our Ponoko office! We want to make sure that users and those thinking about Ponoko can find the help they need in getting technical issues sorted out in making their designs and uploading them onto Ponoko. Here are some useful links - user communities and tutorials on everything Illustrator (in no particular order):
Illustrator User Group Forum - Join other Illustrator aficionados in this lively discussion forum hosted by Digital Media Net.
Illustrator World — This is a community site devoted to Adobe® Illustrator® software and vector graphics. View and share Illustrator artwork with other users, read and contribute to forums, access tips and techniques, and participate in design contests.
DeZine Zone Tutorials - Look to the left side menu and see the Illustrator tutorials for Beginners, Intermediate and Advanced
N.Design Studio - Design blog by a designer who shares his passion in Illustrator tutorials intended for intermediate users.
I know there’s a slew of them out there - some better than others. And since Illustrator integrated a search function with del.icio.us, it should be easier to find the right contextual resources you need — so if you know of any more sites or recommend any particular one, please feel free to add them in the comments - thanks!
Once you get going on Illustrator, go ahead and download your Ponoko Starter Kit in Illustrator for the Ponoko making guide and templates. If you still have questions or want to share some newfound knowledge, check out our Forum to discuss with other Illustrator/Ponoko users.
**Remember we’re running a contest this month for file uploads, so if you create your designs and add them to MyPonoko, you might have a good chance to win $250 worth of fun designing and making with Ponoko.**
Over the holidays I’ve had a bit more time to play around with Inkscape and try my hand at making stuff with Ponoko. And as a newbie with graphic software, there are still some issues that puzzle me. So I turned to our forum to ask this question:
“I have an image I’ve traced and coloured so I can get it rastered onto a piece of acrylic. But I’ve found that when I select the image and try to copy it into the P1 file in the starter kit all the details in the engraving change. The lines just seem to all get thicker and it wrecks the image. Any ideas on why the image is changing when I’m doing a simple cut and past within Inkscape?”
Right away I got a really good step-by-step explanation from Ponoko’s jimmy.kl. So I thought I’d share this on the blog because I know there are some people out there who are dealing with learning curves on Inkscape. Help can be found here on our site, especially on our Forums.
Here’s his reply:
“Hmm, not sure why Inkscape does this but it seems to be adding a black stroke around all the objects you paste into the template.
I fixed it by going to the Fill and Stroke palette, then in the Stroke Paint tab I clicked the cross to remove any stroke from the traced paths.
An example for anyone else following this thread…
In a new document I traced our logo with these settings:
which had this result:
but when I cut n pasted to the P1 template it looked like this:
So I opened up the Fill and Stroke palette, went to the Stroke Paint tab and clicked the cross to remove any stroke from the traced paths and that fixed it.
I will investigate further and see if there’s a way to update the template files so this does not happen. But in the meantime I hope this workaround helps you out Steven.”
If you want to add to the discussion thread, check here, under Making Stuff: Inkscape Issues.
**Remember we’re running a contest this month for file uploads, so if you create your designs and add them to MyPonoko, you might have a good chance to win $250 worth of fun designing and making with Ponoko.**
We’re always trying to improve on how we do things — and hearing from you, our users, is the best way on helping us do that. Got any questions, concerns, or just want to share? The best way to reach us is through our forum.
We heard from some of you on how to cut down on costs by having multiple designs shipped all at once - i.e. how to combine multiple .eps design files in one order. Here’s a quick step-by-step video by Ponoko resident John on how to do just that — making your designing experience that much easier! Thanks John!
**Remember we’re running a contest this month for file uploads, so if you create your designs and add them to MyPonoko, you might have a good chance to win $250 worth of fun designing and making with Ponoko.**
For everyone who wants a complete step-by-step guide to making your own personalized laser-cut jewellery, then check out this brilliant Instructable from Ponoko’s Dan Emery. If you use Inkscape you can download the .svg file that Dan uses in the Instructable here. Inkscape won’t open .eps files so if you want to customize Dan’s design you can use the .svg instead and convert your custom design into .eps once you’ve completed it.
Remember we’re running a contest this month for file uploads, so if you create your designs and add them to MyPonoko you might have a good chance to win $250 making on Ponoko to get them made real.
At the end of last year we spent a day at the office working on our own holiday creation challenge. Dan challenged the team with a brief to “design and make something that would keep a child entertained for hours”.
1. He doesn’t do anything at all to remember you on Valentine’s Day
2. He makes an excuse like, “I was too busy at work to get anything”.
3. He buys you chocolates or flowers but doesn’t even write anything in the card.
4. He expects you to have arranged a romantic evening.
5. He thinks you’re going to “make his night” just because its Valentine’s Day, even though he’s done nothing.
Or this post could be called, “How to Show Your Lady You Are A Superstar This Valentine’s Day”. You see Valentine’s Day is tough. In order to show you love the lady in your life you are supposed to give something thoughtful. And let’s face it chocolates and flowers don’t cut it. In fact if you don’t go “thoughtful” then you have to go expensive to impress, either an expensive restaurant or a piece of jewellery. And that quite frankly gentlemen, that just don’t fit your budget.
But don’t worry! There is a way you can really do something completely out of this world this Valentine’s Day. Something that will get you the big smiles and twinkle in her eye that we know you’re looking for. And ladies, it’s not a boys only thing. If you think that men don’t appreciate you doing something unique for them then you haven’t tried hard enough yet.
Check out the pieces of jewellery below from Dan Emery. Dan created these using Vecteezy, a free image index, and then had the Ponoko laser cutter cut the shapes for him. The neat thing about them is they take almost ZERO design skills. All you do is choose an image you like, draw the jewellery shape you want around the image, choose your material, upload your file to Ponoko and presto! You can even add those special words that you know will make her Valentine’s day, and every day she wears it - without killing your credit card or looking cheap.
Of course, the key to this is that when you give your Valentine’s gift you look into his/her eyes and say: “this was created by me, for you, it’s unique, and nothing else like it exists anywhere in the world - just like you”. Valentine’s Day is officially one of the only times you can get away with a line like this.
So, what’s the next step? Go sign up for Ponoko here, have a look at the Starter Guide and our other resources and get designing. There is still time to get it done if you hustle, you need to give us at least a week to get the end result to you. If you are having any problems, check out our Forums or leave a comment on the blog and we’ll help you out.
Here at Ponoko we know that there are SO many of you who are really excited about designing your own products. But there are some hurdles to get over, and the first that usually stumps people is actually getting your design into a form that can be made into something real. For those of you with design skills and experience using Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw it’s not such an issue. But for all you newbies the team here at Ponoko are studiously working on more How-To’s to help you expand your creativity.
One tool we are going to put a lot of focus on is Inkscape since it has some neat features for you new Designers that I know you’ll like. I know I do. The most obvious are:
B: It runs on Mac OSX and Windows. In fact I run it on both and it seems to be identical even.
and C: It’s FREE.
In my opinion, software is created to do something for me. Whether it’s sending an email or creating beautiful and unique jewellery NOT take hours of my time before I can even get a result from it. So normally when I get a new software package to use, I try to just do what I want rather than completely read the manual. While I’m sure that’s a bit frustrating for software developers who are probably shouting, “Read THE MANUAL Steven!!!” at their screens right now, I think a lot of people do this.
So if you are that way inclined and would like to get a quick win with Inkscape my very first suggestion is that you try tracing an image using the video at the bottom of this post. It is included in the Instructable that Dan and John created. Using the videos, the Making Guide in the Inkscape Starter Kit, and a lot of playing around my son and I were able to design our first piece of jewellery on Ponoko earlier this week. It took us quite a bit of time to get the image where we wanted it (mostly because of my lack of experience with Inkscape) and to then get it into the .eps version for Ponoko, but we did get there eventually. And it was very satisfying when we finally uploaded the completed .eps file to MyPonoko - a bit like having our first baby.
Here are some simple points that we came up with during the process that I think might make it easer for you to get the results you want without spending the same amount of time that I did. (Thank goodness for school holidays).
1. Choose a simple image! It can be tempting to want to trace something complicated but it can be depressing if it takes too long to get a first result. Especially if working with kids. Following the video below will really help. Please note the video pauses after about 10 seconds you just need to press play again to get it started. I find it’s easier just dragging the video slider to the point I’m working on so I can focus on that point in the process.
2. In the Ponoko starter kit it mentions that you MUST have your lines a certain color and stroke width so that the laser cutter knows to Cut, Raster or Engrave. But, I suggest you don’t do this UNTIL AFTER YOU’VE FINISHED YOUR DRAWING AND FITTED IT TO THE INKSCAPE STARTER KIT TEMPLATE. We started changing the lines as we worked but discovered after much drawing that the line widths we’re seemingly changing automatically. VERY FRUSTRATING! But when we left it to the end it was actually very easy to select and change the lines as a group. Knowing this would have saved us a lot of time. John and Dan created another video below that is very helpful with this and I suggest you watch that too.
3. Another reason NOT to change the lines for the Laser Cutter while you are working on your drawing is that they become so darn small that you need to use the magnifying tool to see them and then you can’t see the whole picture. You can avoid this by just drawing in a stroke width you like and changing them all at the end for the Laser.
4. When converting you lines to the right color and width for the Ponoko Laser you’ll need to set the RGBA values in the “Fill and Stroke” window. Within the Starter Kit it currently mentions only the RGB values. This only gets confusing if like me you start setting the A to 0 when thinking it’s the B. This causes your lines to disappear (and your kids to scream). You need to keep the A at 255 (as shown in the video above and image below).
With this much information you should be really dangerous now. Especially if creating customized jewellery, stencils, holiday decorations or any other 2d object is your first goal! Dan is putting together a new Instructable on a piece of jewellery he’s made and we’ll have that up for you to look at very soon.
