Category Archives: How To

Various how to’s with information about how to avoid, fix, and solve problems with your MakerBot

Goblin Hours, Enabled

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I’ve often told my family that if it were not for them, I’d basically work all night, every night, on whatever latest project popped into my brain, and then fall asleep at the workbench/eating plank/soldering station every night/early morning.

The thing is, these tendencies just aren’t very conducive when it comes to trying to live with other people, especially those you’re semi-responsible for.1 It’s especially challenging to work in a professional environment at DayJob™️when I’m working crazy hours.  I don’t want my clients or the other people I work with realizing they’re communicating with the functional equivalent of three meth-addled racoons in a trench coat.23

I have a few ways of passing for a socially normative respectable professional.  Here are some of my coping mechanisms:

  • I’ve put several buttons into Outlook’s quick access toolbar.  The most important are:
    • “Delay Delivery” so that I can draft and hit “send” on an email, but not have it go out until a socially acceptable time
    • “Signature” so that I can easily send an email with my “mobile” email signature or my full fledged obnoxiously enormous “professional” email signature.  Why would I do this, you ask?  Well, if I want to get away with a quick reply and not really do a deep dive, I’ll fire off an email as if I were typing from my phone.  I’ll even introduce “strategic typos” to really sell the impression.  Then again, if I’m typing a really long email into my phone and want to have it appear more impressive, I’ll use the “professional” signature.
    • “Work Offline” so that I can work uninterrupted for even a little while.  Being able to shut off the firehose that is my daily work email inbox is incredibly helpful.
  • I addressed strategic typos earlier, but it’s really genuinely a real coping mechanism aside from just an email signature.  Adding typos makes it more likely someone will focus on appreciating your responsiveness and less likely they’ll get nitpicky about the content.
  • My old cell phone using Google Voice as my “personal cell phone” number.  I don’t want to talk to people, but it’s basically unavoidable.  Then again, a quick text from the phone can handle many situations.  Even better, clients feel like they really have access to me.  It’s also nice that I can keep Google Voice open on my desktop and be able to “text” from my computer and using my keyboard.  In reality, I just leave this secondary phone and just … walk away from it.  No one outside my family needs that much access to my life.
  • I’ve spent a lot of time tracking my productivity and know what days I’m the least productive.  Unsurprisingly, it’s Mondays and very especially Fridays.  This means I try to avoid meetings on these days as much as possible so that I can lean into unproductivity if I need to.  Why flog myself into working ever harder when I already know that however hard I push myself, it’s just not gonna be a productive day?
  • I really try to avoid all meetings.  Mercifully in person meetings are all but extinct.  Video meetings are nearly as bad, but at least I don’t have to wear pants.  Whenever I have a video meeting (or phone conference), I will make a special effort to ask for an “agenda.”  If you don’t have an agenda, or at least some kind of idea about what you want to accomplish at a meeting you’ll never know if you’ve succeeded at the meeting … or when it should end.  And, once I have the agenda, I will send an email with as much detail and cover as many points as possible.  Sure, no one will read it… but its’ my way of preparing for the meeting and I can keep referring back to it as necessary. I’d say in roughly 40% of situations that email is enough to torpedo the entire meeting.
  • Recently I created, with the help of ChatGPT4 I wrote an Outlook macro which will help me automate when I send emails.  Whenever the “Work Offline” button is toggled and I hit “send” on an email, it picks a random time between 7:15 AM and 7:59 AM and schedules the email to go out on the next business day.  Sure, this means people will get a flood of emails from me first thing on Monday morning.  But, it’s that a lot better than getting a stream of emails from me all weekend?
  • I hate phone calls, so I will dodge as many as I can get away with.  And, when I’m on a long phone call, I will play a recording of someone knocking on my door and asking for my attention in increasingly urgent tones, until I can get off the line.

I don’t know – maybe this all adds up to some kind of antisocial behavior or DSM IV diagnosis?  What I do know is that with these various tools I’m able to better work with others in a professional setting.

It’s a little after 4AM right now.  I’m not sure how to end this post so I’m just going to publish it.  :)

  1. In so far as I can be responsible for other humans [↩]
  2. God, wouldn’t that be an amazing Halloween costume?!  Me dressed as three racoons dressed as me?!!? [↩]
  3. Where was I? [↩]
  4. Don’t @ me.  I don’t care. [↩]

Combining Multiple Video Files

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Rather than send me a single set of video files, my client’s vendor sent me… 149 separate MP4 files, ranging from a few seconds to about 11 minutes long.  I have no interest in sorting through dozens of video files, cataloging them individually, and then trying to review them in order.

While I would have thought VLC would have been a good drag-n’-drop way to stitch them all together, the version I had and the newest version available both weren’t letting me save multiple files into a single file.

A bit of googling and I stumbled across an old friend – ffmpeg!  I hadn’t used this program to transcode video since the early days of DIVX, backing up DVD’s back in the late 1990’s / early aughts.

Here’s the process I settled on for my Windows machine:

  • Created a batch file to create a list of the video files (which included spaces, commas, and all kinds of nonsense command line tools hate).  The entire contents of the batch file was:
    • dir *.mp4 /b > list.txt
  • Since I’m using Notepad++, I used the find/replace function to search / replace on “list.txt”:
    • /r/n
    • ‘/r/nfile ‘
  • Even using some find/replace magic, I still needed to adjust the first and last lines, but that wasn’t so bad.
  • Then, the videos which had been named in semi-logical pattern, were not in strictly alphanumeric order.  I re-ordered them in the text list to the order I’d wanted to view them in.
  • I dropped the FFMPEG executable, downloaded from this mirror, into the folder with the video files and list.txt, then made a new batchfile which contained the following:
    • ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i list.txt -c copy combinedfilename.mp4
  • Now, I could have typed this into the command line, but since I wanted to batch certain files together, it was just easier for my purposes to have the batch file.  Plus, now I have the executable and the batch file for future use.

Anyhow, I hope this helps save someone, perhaps even myself, a few minutes of hair pulling and searching.  :)

Adventures with a (Cheap) Vinyl Cutter

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I don’t have any affiliate links to shill, but I really like Monoprice.  They sold cheap re-branded 3D printers, decent office equipment, and sometimes they will have an absolutely ridiculous deal on one of their products.  I’d say, overall, the quality is “pretty good” across the board and when you can find a deal on something, it’s an easy decision.  I picked up an extra Monoprice Mini Delta 3D printer because it was so cheap, I could use it for parts and not feel bad.1  I’ve been happy with their egg cooker, USB hubs, HDMI cables, various random testers.  The other day I saw they had a sale on their “MakerCraft Mini Craft Cutter” for $80, when it’s normally $230, with free shipping and had to buy it.  If you missed out, I’d highly recommend signing up for their newsletter.  About twice a year they have some deal that’s just bananas.

It’s been sitting off in a corner for nearly two months while I’ve been distracted by Maker Faire preparations and work, but tonight I gave it a shot.  I’d say, like most other MonoPrice things, it’s “pretty good.”  The included software “Sure Cuts A Lot Pro 5” is not very intuitive, the documentation on the machine and software is pretty lacking, and the tutorials aren’t very helpful either.

Even so, with some futzing around I was able to run a test cut and mostly get another design cut out.  Pictures later.

Here are some of the things I learned:

  • After you drop the blade into the machine, be sure the carriage and move all the way back and forth.  It’s very easy to have it protrude upwards very slightly, causing a horrible clacking / grinding noise.
  • I’m not sure if it’s me, the way I loaded the sticky back cutting mat, or some combination, but the large design I cut out was  off the piece of vinyl by about 1″.  I would recommend making sure your piece of vinyl is about as big as the 8×10 cutting mat.  I am not sure, but I suspect the “vertical” direction has a lot more variability than the “horizontal” direction.

I tried to cut things several times without success.  I tried a lot of different ways to get it going, so I don’t know what got me cutting.  At first the machine would beep at be intermittently, and then regularly.  I have no idea what caused that to happen – or why it stopped.

After the machine registration / cutting mat homing procedure, which sounded about as much as you would expect a small plotter to sound, it was surprisingly quiet.  I’ve never used a craft or vinyl cutter before, so I guess I had just built it up in my head.

I’m going to try cutting some more things tomorrow and look forward to posting some more progress.

I’ve cut several medium complexity designs out of HTV and it was incredibly tedious.  I tossed a very complicated design into this craft cutter and it quietly ripped it out like a champ.  For $80 shipped, I would easily recommend this device to anyone who wanted to experiment with a craft cutter and wasn’t afraid to spend some time tinkering with software and settings.

  1. And, later, I had to! [↩]

How to Uninstall McAfee AntiVirus

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I got to my computer this morning and discovered a pop-up from McAfee AntiVirus altering me to some nonsense or other.  Without going into all the reasons, I don’t like or want McAfee on any of my computers.  Given when it was installed, I believe it was quietly bundled with the Adobe Reader I installed yesterday (and now uninstalled as well).

I went through the normal process of trying to uninstall a program:

  • Settings
  • Add / Remove Programs
  • Find “McAfee” and click “Uninstall”
  • When you do, you’ll see a small window pop up offering you some promotion.  However, this is where the uninstallation process stopped for me!  The window appeared too small and the text too large and the only options available to me were to close the window (in which case McAfee stays) or click on their offer (which didn’t tantalize me either).  There was no way to scroll the contents of the window to see what else was below their text and offer.
  • I realized there might be more below their offer, so I hit the “Tab” button a few times.  This caused the window to focus on the next button “Uninstall” (in white) on the bottom left and to see the “Go to Offer” (or somesuch, I wasn’t paying attention to it) button on the bottom right.
  • I clicked Uninstall and it hasn’t been back since…

Hope that helps!

Review of DriveThruCards.com

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TLDR:  The cards from DriveThruCards.com (DTC) arrived yesterday and I couldn’t be happier with the result.  Great customer service, product, and value.

  1. Shipping:  Great
    1. 3/19/2024:  I ordered 120 cards around 2 AM PST in California.
    2. 3/19/2024:  The DTC website was updated with the following statuses:  Pending Payment Approval, Paid For, Sent to printer, Confirmed.
    3. 3/24/2024:  I received a shipping confirmation email from DTC in Overland Park, Kansas with a USPS tracking number at about 4:32 PM PST.
    4. 03/25/2024:  The date on the “External Packing Slip” included with the box.
    5. 3/28/2024:  USPS sent me a notification the package arrived around 8:29 AM PST.
    6. This was basically exactly as long as my Reddit lurking had suggested (about 10 days) it would take.

      Order confirmation and status screen

      Order confirmation and status screen

  2. Packaging:  Great
    1. The cards arrived wrapped in a cellophane band, within packing paper, inside a small box (about 5″x5″x3.5″ cube).  This was perfectly fine for these cards.  They have options for tuck boxes and other containers, but I didn’t need or want these for this project.
  3. Card Quality:  Great
    1. Text and images were sharp, legible, and colors rich but slightly darker than what I saw on my computer screen.  By tinkering with Inkscape, I would guesstimate the final card was about 5-10% less bright than what I saw on my screen.  Without comparing the cards directly against a large bright monitor, I don’t think I would have noticed this difference.
    2. When I set the deck down on a flat surface and run my finger over the side of the stack of cards, there’s a very slight variation over a few cards.  It’s barely perceptible and probably totally fine for any kind of card usage or card game except a super precise cut for casino playing cards.
    3. When the cards are viewed edge-on in a stack, you can tell see a faint bit of the card’s edge color.  I grabbed some “Magic: the Gathering” cards and looked at a mix of black and white bordered cards and noticed that even the black border cards seem to look white-ish when viewed edge on.  The slight bit of color here doesn’t bother me at all and for most purposes would be totally irrelevant.
    4. The cards were 2.503″ or 63.57 mm wide and 3.506″ or 89.05 mm tall, or about 0.2% large.  Some variation is to be expected in any order and this miniscule variation would be completely unnoticeable except I used digital calipers to measure them.
    5. The cards, printed on DTC’s “premium stock,” advertised as 11.4 pt (0.0114″) were 0.0115″ or 0.29 mm thick.  Flicking the cards against a table, right next to an actual casino poker card, they felt identical.  (The casino card has a slightly raised texture, but the flex, bounce, and flick of the card stock felt identical).
    6. Card Cut.  This is the one aspect that didn’t come out exactly as I had planned.  Ten of the cards I printed had borders, but they were visibly different widths at each end.  These cards were Premium U.S. Poker sized (2.5″ x 3.5″), the PDF itself was 2.75″ x 3.75″ (to account for the 1/8″ bleed area at each edge).  Unfortunately, I didn’t notice this until after I had used the cards a bit, so I don’t know whether top or the bottom was slightly thinner.  Since these cards are basically dividers, this isn’t a huge deal for me.  However, I’d prefer being able to get them back with an even border all the way around.
  4. Customer Service:  I discussed the responsiveness of the DTC customer service team in the prior post.  They went out of their way to help me with my project – and it really smoothed things for me.

I simply could not be happier with these cards.  I will absolutely be trying them again.

Print On Demand Custom Cards
  1. Custom Cards with DriveThruCards.com
  2. Review of DriveThruCards.com

Custom Cards with DriveThruCards.com

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I’ve been looking to get some playing sized cards for various purposes recently.  I’ve enjoyed making my own cards from blanks ordered off of Amazon, but for things that might get used a little more regularly, it would actually help to have these things pre-typed/printed.  And, as a long-time / returning enthusiast of a particular card card game, I was also looking to print up some proxy cards for casual play.  I don’t want counterfeit cards – just make some obviously unofficial stand-ins for real cards in casual play.

  1. Cost Breakdown
    1. If you do any kind of Googling about searching for a company to print up cards of various sizes, you’ll quickly end up at MakePlayingCards.com – or a company that has a website that looks nearly identical to MPC.  Getting a single deck of custom cards printed up through MPC is $26.15 for up to 108 cards (they offer incremental price breaks) plus $11.99 shipping (with tracking taking about 20 days) as the cheapest option, coming to $40.17 (including some tax).  This is roughly $0.37/card.
    2. Lurking in some Reddit forums, I found a few suggestions on different ways to create proxy Magic: the Gathering cards.  These forums renewed my interest in getting some cards printed up – and lead me to DriveThruCards.com.  I just placed an order for 120 cards,1 but I’ll describe the cost for 108 cards for an apples-to-apples comparison.  A single deck of custom cards printed through DTC is $12.42, plus $5.99 shipping (USPS Ground Advantage and anecdotal evidence from Reddit suggests ~10 days), plus  $1.00 in tax, comes to $19.41.  This is roughly $0.18/card.
  2. Benefits / Costs
    1. There’s no question the MPC website is cleaner and slicker, featuring drag and drop options, without a lot of technical jargon about printing, colors, etc.  They also seem to have many more options for card sizes, materials, and finishes.  They also have lots of templates in various formats to download and populate.  The obvious downsides are the length of shipping required and the cost, both estimated to be roughly twice that of DTC which is apparently in Overland, Kansas.
    2. The DTC website is… by their own admission, “challenging to learn.”  While I’m sure the interface permits a ton of customization, the dizzying array of options is daunting.  They have lots of guides on their website and knowledge base, as well as elsewhere, but it’s probably too much information.  I went with DTC for my first custom card order because I wanted to inexpensively try out some ideas and I figured that after the first order, I’d probably get the hang of their system.  However, one thing that really sets DTC apart is the responsiveness of their customer service.  I’d emailed them in the middle the day and middle of the night (aka goblin hours) and someone always back to me super fast.  Although DTC doesn’t have official PDF templates, Brian with DTC kindly whipped one up and emailed it to me which answered tons of my questions.
  3. Anatomy of a Printed Card
    1. Both MPC, DTC, and other print-on-demand (POD) websites have numerous descriptions, graphics, tutorials, and samples all using slightly different words, relating to the various sizes, printing zones, etc.  I found it incredibly confusing.  Now, I’m not certain I’ve gotten everything right, but here’s my best understanding…
      Annotated sample poker card

      Annotated sample poker card

      1. Cut Line / Trim Line / Bleed Line.
        1. The area described by the solid black line will be where the card is trimmed to the exact dimensions of the card.  The good thing about knowing what this line means is that if you know the final dimensions of your type of card, this is easy to look up and then design everything else around it.
        2. Importantly, you don’t want to include this line in your designs.  The purpose of the “safe” zone area is so the critical components of your design are certain to appear on the final product – even if it is perhaps slightly offcut.  The purpose of the “bleed” zone is to make sure a “full art” card doesn’t have bits of white or black at the edge if it is very slightly miscut.
      2. Safe Area Line / Border.  The important part to know here is that the distance from the “cut line” to the safe area is 1/8″ or 3.175 mm on all sides.  Thus, if you know the dimensions of the card you want, you just make sure your critical art and text don’t exceed this area.  All the area inside the safe area line is the “safe zone.”
      3. Bleed Box / Bleed Area / “Full Bleed” / Page Size.  As with the Safe Area Line, this is easy to figure out – it’s just 1/8″ or 3.175 mm outside the edges of the cut line.  This should be a rectangle.
  4. Software / Design Process
    1. I don’t have Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, or Affinity Publisher – and I wasn’t going to buy / subscribe to any of these just for this one project.  What I do have, however, is OpenSCAD and Inkscape.  Using OpenSCAD I started with a rectangle of the precise dimensions to match the exterior of the “US poker” card I wanted printed, then exported this to an SVG file.  I then did this for a rectangle of the “bleed box” size, safe line, and also the trim line.  I then imported all of these into Inkscape, layered them, and used them as guides while I designed my cards.  I made sure the critical areas were within the safe line, but made the safe line, trim line, etc all invisible.  Inkscape will allow you to export a file into a PDF file format which DTC accepts.  I created fronts and backs for cards, each exported as a separate PDF, then combined all of them using one of my favorite pieces of freeware, PDFTK.
  5. Potential Issues, Fixes
    1. Unembedded Fonts.  Apparently Inkscape did not embed all of the fonts used in the creation of the PDF.  When I tried to upload the PDF originally, DTC’s uploader balked at this and said I’d need to embed the fonts.  While I used a different PDF program (Foxit PDF is reasonably full featured and way less expensive than Adobe) to embed the fonts, I think I could have simply re-exported all the card faces as images instead of PDFs, then combined those into a new PDF which just had pictures (including pictures of the desired text).  It might have been possible to change the fonts as well to be more uniform, but given the number of cards I was creating, I didn’t want to do that.
    2. Currency.  I’m putting this here more for me than anyone else who might stop by.  At some point while using their website I accidentally did something which made all the prices and calculations appear in the Japanese Yen.  :/  I’d been through the account settings numerous times and even cleared my cookies and website cache trying to fix this problem.  After an embarrassingly long time, I gave up and emailed Brian to ask for help.  As so often happens to me… moments after hitting send I saw website footer had a drop down box to choose the currency and language.  Sorry Brian!

So, what’s next?  Well, after placing the order at roughly 2am PST on 3/19/2024, now it’s time to just wait and find out if the cards are going to get produced and arrive!  It’s now almost 6 pm PST, and their Order History page says “Sent to printer.”  Some Reddit posts suggest that it takes another 1-2 weeks to actually ship.

Print On Demand Custom Cards
  1. Custom Cards with DriveThruCards.com
  2. Review of DriveThruCards.com
  1. $20.86, if you’re being nosy [↩]

Heat Transfer Vinyl T-Shirts Without a Craft Cutter (2023)

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Saturday, October 21
Zone 2 – Make: Demo Stage
2:30 pm – 3:00 pm
Let’s goooooooooooooooooooo!

Heat Transfer Vinyl T-Shirts (Without a Craft Cutter)
  1. Heat Transfer Vinyl T-Shirts – Without A Vinyl Cutter
  2. Heat Transfer Vinyl T-Shirts – Without A Vinyl Cutter, Part II
  3. Heat Transfer Vinyl T-Shirts Without a Craft Cutter (2023)

DIY Carved Eraser QR Code Stamp

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After some modest success carving some neat designs into pink erasers, I tried making a QR code stamp.  It didn’t work well at all, with exactly just one impression working … sometimes.

The first attempt took a really long time and turned out terribly.  After a few days break, and some mental distance from the project, I returned with some new ideas and inspiration.

Here was my new approach and plan:

1. The Stamp

  1. Go Slow.  Proceeding slowly and methodically is always a good idea with sharp instruments.  I went fairly slowly the first time, but this time I would be even more methodical.
  2. Cutting.  Rather than using the carving blades for the QR code features, I switched to using a craft knife.  It was just too hard to cut precise lines with a V or U shaped blade, managing not just the direction and speed of the cut – but the depth as well – for both sides of the blade.  The craft blade let me focus on just one side at a time.  I used the blade to cut at about a 45 degree angle along one side, then other side.
  3. Don’t Cut Too Much.  I used calipers to measure the pixels cut into my first attempt as well as the stamped result.  I discovered \the stamp pixels were very slightly larger than their rubber counterparts.  This tells me it would be better to cut too little rubber – and cut more later if necessary.
  4. Removing Scraps.  Rather than sticking my big old fingers into the eraser or trying to pop it out with the blade, I used a pair of 3D printed tweezers to pluck them out.

2. The QR Code

  1. Optimize the QR Code.  There are several ways to optimize a QR code for eraser / stamp carving. 1.  I used as many of these methods as I could:
    1. “Pixel” Size.
      1. As you add more information into a QR code, the QR code generator will need to use more black and white units2 to encode the information.  After some tinkering it seems like the smallest QR code that can be generated is 441 total pixels, 21 wide by 21 tall.  The absolute largest QR code I could generate looks like one of those “magic eye” posters.  I didn’t even try to count how many pixels wide this thing was.  It’s 9,216 pixels, 96 wide by 96 tall.
      2. I was having a hard time carving a stamp 21 pixels wide into a 24.5 mm3 wide eraser, so the idea of carving more than 21 lines into an eraser by hand seemed not feasible.  The very next step up from the 21×21 grid would be a 25×25 grid, so I knew I had to find a way to limit the data, find the best error correction, and find a way to cut these small pixels and thin features.
    2. Proper Error Correction.
      1. QR Codes have built in “error correction” that allows the user’s scanning device to scan information from a partially formed, damaged, or obscured code.  These settings range from L (low), M (medium), Q (quality), and H (high quality) able to error correct from up to 7%, 15%, 25%, and 30% damage respectively.  Lowering the error correction allows you to create a smaller QR Code, but it will also be less robust.
      2. I fiddled with these settings a lot to find the maximum amount of data I could put into a QR code while still retaining a maximum size of 21×21 pixels.  I was able to encode about 16 characters in a L, 13 characters in a M, 10 characters in a Q, 6 characters in a H.  The code stores numeral easier and requires more pixels to store letters and special characters.
      3. My first attempt used an error correction level of L, but was basically unusable as there must have been more than 7% distortion.  This time, I decided to try for a very high level of error correction with the Q setting for 25%.
    3. Reducing Data.  This is where I used some tricks you may, or may not, be able to replicate.
      1. URL Shortener.  A TinyURL link to my Instagram page requires 29 characters.  Looking above, this would immediately suggest a 21×21 pixel QR code would not be possible.
      2. Trimming a Link.  After some fiddling, I realized that as long as the data encoded looked like a URL (as in some characters separated by a “.”), the QR code scanner would interpret it as a link.  This means we can skip the “http://” and “https://”, saving 7-8 characters!  Unfortunately, this still doesn’t let me encode the shortest URL that TinyURL could give me which requires 20 characters after discarding the “http” stuff.
      3. Maybe Just a Domain?  Maybe you just wanted to point someone to your website and not a big long link, shortened with a URL shortener.  Let’s work the numbers backwards.  Most commonly used domains end with “.com”, “.org”, “.biz” – with 4 characters each.  Using the information above, this means we could use a domain name with up to 12 characters for an L encoded QR code, 9 for an M, 6 for a Q, and just 2 for an H.  While it would be easy to find a 12 character domain, you’re stuck with only a 7% margin for your error correction.  A domain with 6 to 9 characters for Q and M would allow for 25% and 15% error correction.  You can still find 6 character “.com” domain, but… they’re unlikely to be very memorable.  This isn’t necessarily a problem.  You might be able to find a good short domain with an unmemorable name, but forwards the user to your real website.  The problem, of course, is that no one is going to want to click on that link.
      4. How About a custom URL Shortener?  It’s still possible to purchase a short URL, but they’re pricey.  I happened to buy a good one several years ago and have hung on tightly to it.  I slapped a YOURLS install on it, and have been using it ever since.  Using my own URL shortener means I can keep the URL down to just 9 characters – including the TLD!

Okay, back to carving.  I grabbed my headphones, put on some music, and took it very slowly – a little under two hours.  Here’s some progress photos:

Here’s how it looked (with some additional shots to show the original design overlaid):

I stamped this design 9 times – and all 9 were more or less easily scannable.  The neat thing about this design is that it points to a URL shortener I own, so not only is it about as tiny as possible, but I can change the destination if I ever needed – without having to spend two hours recarving an eraser stamp!

Eraser Stamp Carving
  1. Carved Eraser Stamping
  2. Further Adventures in Eraser Carving
  3. DIY Carved Eraser QR Code Stamp
  1. I won’t get too much into the weeds on the actual method of generating QR codes, mostly because I haven’t studied the math in it, but I did find a great article which has a lot of good background info and explanations [↩]
  2. I’ll call them “pixels” from this point forward [↩]
  3. Just barely under an inch [↩]

Carved Eraser Stamping

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I recently stumbled across the world of fantastically charming mini prints and carved erasers by Serena Rios McRae aka Cactus Clouds Art.  This short Instagram post provides an excellent overview of her process.

Serena’s artwork is evocative, accessible, and affordable.  I bought several of her prints the other day.  She also posts how-to’s on YouTube and provides plenty of links to her recommended supplies (Serena’s lists and affiliate links).

These looked like so much fun, I bought a pile of cheap pink erasers off Amazon, repurposed an old set of stamp carvers we had lying around (I had done some linoleum block printing back in high school and my wife had a small stamp making kit from years before), and gave it a shot.  The kids had a great time with this while I fretted about whether they were going to jab their fingers and how many bandaids I’d have to have handy.

After their first stamp, I hacked together a 3D printed holder.  Despite measuring the erasers carefully, it was too long and really, too big for what it needed to be.  Here you can see version 01 taped to a piece of mahogany wood left over from my ukulele project.

There were several problems with this first attempt.  The holder was a little too long, so the eraser would shift back and forth.  It was also much bigger than necessary.  I designed it with those large fins on the side to make it easy to tape down, but it really wasn’t necessary and just made rotating the eraser holder a little more unwieldy.  While my kids were carving things using this holder, I went to work printing a few accessories.

3D printed screw top blade container, extra blade handle

3D printed screw top blade container, extra blade handle

The blades came in a little plastic baggie, so I printed a bespoke screw top container for them so they can be stored securely.  I also printed another blade handle so that two people could carve stamps at the same time – one using the original wooden holder and the other using the printed holder.

The next version was more compact and had dimples on the edges which I hoped would make it easier to hold.  I also added some little ridges inside so the eraser wouldn’t fall through.  Here they are:

Eraser holders for carving, versions 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5

Eraser holders for carving, versions 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5

The dimples didn’t work.  They weren’t deep enough and my hand couldn’t really grip it very well to keep it from moving while I was carving.  The area for the eraser was a little too long.  Versions 2-5 involved tuning the length just right.  Each one takes about an hour to print and used about $0.30 of plastic.  The final result fit the erasers like a glove.  They nestle in the holder perfectly and are easy to poke out using the little hole.  Admittedly, they might only fit the specific cheap erasers I found.

Here’s my process:

I created a page of eraser templates, which match the length and width of the large and small edges.  Of course, the long section matches the long side of the eraser – but the shorter section only matches the short side of the eraser if you tip it over.

Eraser templates

Eraser templates

I got to use several iterations of the eraser holder for this next section:

All the pieces, laid out nice and orderly

All the pieces, laid out nice and orderly

The process is pretty easy.  Put the eraser in the eraser holder – it should slip right in, drop in snugly, and lie flush with the top edge of the plastic holder.  After cutting out a paper strip, it’s trimmed to size, creased to locate the central point, and a pencil drawing (drawn as I’d like to see it printed).  This is taped upside down onto the eraser, rubbed along the back (a coin would work very well, but I just used one of the extra eraser holders), and the design is neatly transferred to the eraser.  The neat thing about this process is that I could design something in Inkscape, print it into the template, and color it in with the pencil for transferring to the eraser.

Lastly, let’s see the result!

Eraser stamp!

Eraser stamp!

As you can see, the final stamped result matches the orientation of the little drawing.  I just wish I’d saved the little scrap of paper with the original drawing on it!  The eraser holder was a joy to use and the final result looks every bit as great as I was hoping.

If I keep making these, I’ll probably want to upgrade my setup to include Serena’s recommended stamp pad and sharpener (you’ll see them linked in Serena’s Amazon link above).  I’d like to design something to make easy to hold the eraser, center it, and make a clean even stamp, but don’t have a great idea for one yet.  I’ll keep pondering this and maybe whip something up this weekend.

Eraser Stamp Carving
  1. Carved Eraser Stamping
  2. Further Adventures in Eraser Carving
  3. DIY Carved Eraser QR Code Stamp
  1. I mean, I guess it’s version 1 – but I labeled all the purple ones starting with 1 so… [↩]

Heat Transfer Vinyl T-Shirts – Without A Vinyl Cutter, Part II

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I recently posted my method for making DIY heat transfer vinyl t-shirts without a craft / vinyl cutter.  I used the process to make an Avatar: The Last Airbender themed t-shirt, then a set of four Fallout themed t-shirts for the entire family.  After that I designed, cut, and ironed several more t-shirts. (You’ll see me refer to ironing the design several times, but each time I ironed the vinyl through a piece of parchment paper, to protect the design from scorching and the iron from being marred by melted plastic)

I learned a few more things along the way and thought I’d share these newb-mistakes and pro-tips.

But first, how about some pictures?!

  1. Cutting Designs
    1. Just be careful and go slow.
  2. Design Size
    1. I tend to make designs that are no more than about 6″ wide.  This has seemed to be a really good size to show off a cool design, but also fits neatly in the center of an 8.5″x11″ piece of standard printer paper.  You could make something a lot larger, but for all of my designs, this has worked out really well.
  3. Preparing Designs
    1. I forgot to take a picture of it, but it helps to draw an X and Y axis into your drawing.  The purpose of this is to help orient your design at the center of the fabric.  After I had cut out the design entirely, I then used the craft knife to cut triangles into the protective layer pointing towards the center of the XY axis center of the design.  Then, once this was done I could draw the XY axis lines on the protective layer.
    2. I used a yard stick to estimate the center line of the shirt, which I could then align with the XY axis lines on the design itself.
  4. Position Your Design
    1. After looking at various other t-shirts, I decided they tended to look best when the top of the design was about 3″ lower than the bottom of the “V” in my v-neck shirts.
    2. Once I had the shirt on the ironing board, I also put pieces of masking tape with a pen line on the ironing board to help me position and orient the yard stick repeatedly.
  5. Heat / Press
    1. Unlike my first attempt, I made sure to really push hard on the iron.  The idea is that you’re not just melting the vinyl adhesive, but actually melting it into the fabric.  If your iron isn’t hot enough, you’re not ironing long enough, or you’re not pressing hard enough, it won’t actually melt into the fabric.
    2. When you’ve melted it properly, you should see an almost… bubbly texture underneath the protective coating.  Then, once the vinyl is cool and you’ve peeled the coating off, the vinyl should look a little rippled since it is taking on the texture of the underlying fabric.
  6. Iron, Cool, Wait, Inspect Vinyl, then Peel
    1. I made this mistake with the arc reactor t-shirt.  As I peeled the protective coating off, in one spot the vinyl got pulled up and in another spot it tore the corner off a sharp trapezoid in the design!  While it is possible I didn’t have the iron hot enough or press hard enough, I think the most likely explanation is that I didn’t wait long enough for the vinyl to cool – so it was still molten enough to be adhering to both the shirt and protective coating, causing the design to be damaged and torn.
  7. Peeling Direction
    1. If your design includes very thin or sharp little pieces (such as the pointy trapezoids in the Iron Man arc reactor), consider changing the direction of the protective coating peeling to avoid peeling towards a sharp point.  These little points have so little surface area they can easily stay stuck to the coating and get pulled off the shirt, ruining all your hard work.
  8. Repairing Mistakes
    1. The problem with making a mistake with heat transfer vinyl is that if you make a serious mistake to your design or application, you may have ruined a shirt.  (I would 100% wear a comfortable shirt even if the design wasn’t perfect.)  However, a little mistake doesn’t have to be the end of the world.  I made two mistakes on my arc reactor t-shirt, that I was able to fix well enough that they probably wouldn’t be obvious to the casual observer.

      Yellow arrows show where the design pulled up and wrinkled slightly. The red arrows point to where the design tore and was repaired.

      Yellow arrows show where the design pulled up and wrinkled slightly. The red arrows point to where the design tore and was repaired.

    2. The design of the arc reactor is about 3″ across, to give you a sense of the scale and size of the mistakes.  You can see two slight wrinkles in the vinyl, pointed out by the yellow arrows.  The red arrows points to where you can barely make out what appear to be wrinkles – but show where the design was torn and repaired.
    3. I didn’t find any really good way to fix the wrinkles, other than to really iron those areas very very hard.  It mostly pressed the wrinkles flat and they’re barely noticeable on the shirt.  Between the shimmery / reflective quality of the vinyl and uneven way a shirt would hang on a non-rectilinear organic body or form and the size of the wrinkles on the small design, it’s almost imperceptible.
    4. The torn design was initially quite heartbreaking.  By the time I had worked on this shirt, I had already created five other shirts without any kind of mistake.  It just so happened I either incompletely cut the design out (I don’t think so) or was a little impatient as I peeled the design (probably), and tore a pretty big piece off of the end of the right side trapezoid pointed out by the red arrow.  I tried to use my craft knife to peel the tip of the trapezoid off the protective coating, but it wasn’t working and I ended up mangling it beyond repair.  After stewing a bit, I figured I would simply cut out a new trapezoid piece and iron down over the torn piece.  I made sure to cut the new piece very slightly larger (we’re talking probably only 0.5 mm in each direction) and position it carefully over the damaged section, before ironing it down very firmly, waiting for it to cool down all the way, peeling the coating, then ironing it again.  Once again, I think the damaged portions wouldn’t be noticeable to most observers.

I would guesstimate a 5-foot long and 12″ wide roll of heat transfer vinyl could comfortably make 10-15 good sized designs and as much as 20 if you’re very careful.  Let’s say you can only make about 14 designs out of a roll, to be on the conservative side.  At about $7 for a basic color roll, this about $0.50 worth of vinyl per shirt.  My wife bought me several 2-pack blank v-neck shirts in assorted colors for about $14 per pack.  Ignoring the cost of my time (it’s a hobby, remember!) this is only about $7.50 per custom shirt.  I think this could make a really cool and inexpensive project for a class, letting all the kids make their own designs (by cutting the vinyl with scissors instead of craft knives, if they’re young) or to create a set of team shirts for a field trip or club.

Not only has this been a very fun and inexpensive hobby, I end up with a great looking custom t-shirt at the end that will probably last years.

I’ve got several more designs I’m working on and look forward to a few more updates.

Heat Transfer Vinyl T-Shirts (Without a Craft Cutter)
  1. Heat Transfer Vinyl T-Shirts – Without A Vinyl Cutter
  2. Heat Transfer Vinyl T-Shirts – Without A Vinyl Cutter, Part II
  3. Heat Transfer Vinyl T-Shirts Without a Craft Cutter (2023)