Vinyl Cutter Summative/Weekly Blog

Post date: May 11, 2018 8:48:25 PM

As I devoted this week entirely to my vinyl cutter project, this blog will serve as both my weekly blog and the blog for the summative vinyl cutter project. This week, I worked on the vinyl cutter summative, which involved creating a decal for a teacher and a t-shirt for myself. I have been able to completing both, which has allowed me to demonstrate mastery in vinyl cutting.

I created a decal for my robotics teacher, Mr. Craw. The decal is prominently displayed on his door and says "Worlds or Bust" and on the next line "FRC". For my t-shirt, I created a shirt inspired by the hit TV show, "The Office". I had to go through many different iterations for both the decal and the shirt.

For the decal, I was having trouble with creating "I"s, so I switched my design. Later, I learned that I could replace the "I"s in my design with boxes, because they both look the same.

The design for my shirt was the same through the entire time, but my first iteration never happened because I forgot to flip the design when I vinyl cut it. Then, when I was finally able to create the shirt, the design burned. The shirt was completed but it didn't look really good. I reprinted the design and tried to iron it on the shirt again. But the heat press didn't work. And it didn't work for the next 5 times I tried. After talking with my classmates, we made the heat press hotter by 100°F and it finally worked. The result was a really nice shirt that looks "professional".

Design for the decal.

Decal on the door. I vinyl cut the design, and then used transfer tape to transfer the design from the paper backing to the door of Mr. Craw's classroom.

Zoomed in picture of the decal

Ironing the design onto the shirt

The first iteration of the design. If you look closely, you will see the letters have holes, which indicate that the design got burned.

The final shirt. As you can see, the design is not burned and looks very nice. The shirt is of a company from the "mockumentary" The Office. Dunder Mifflin was the company that they worked at. Anyhow, I asked around and people said it looked like it was done professionally.