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Trust Me, I'm an Engineer.

Archives for February 2016

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Crafting HQ

Quilting Squares Everywhere
The Quilting HST (half square triangles) are multiplying!

The Boxers project is COMPLETE!!!! 2 projects down and 8 more to go! I think the next project is going to be either a herb garden or a wooden tool box.

I have not had as much time lately to work on knitting/updating the website because I have been helping #The_Wookie work on her quilt. I have become quite the expert HST (half square triangle, for those not in the know) cutter. Actually, my apartment has become a crafting mecca for #The_Wookie and myself. The sewing machine has been living on the kitchen table or the coffee table for the past couple of weeks, there are treads everywhere, a Cricut in the corner, and supplies stuffed here and there. I LOVE IT!

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Awesome Laptop Vinyls

Weeding the Vinyl cutout.
Weeding the Vinyl cutout.

I have been wanting a something cool to put on the top of my work laptop for a while, and #The_Wookie has a Cricut. For those of you not in the know (i.e. Me before meeting #The_Wookie), a Cricut is a programmable 2-D paper (or vinyl or fabric or poster board) cutter. It has a snazzy web based interface that allows you to upload images, do some basic manipulation, and have a image to cut out in less than 5 minutes. After manipulating the images to get them ready to cut we loaded up the black vinyl on to the Cricut and hit “Go” (The Cricut software equivalent of “print”). Once the vinyl was cut, I very carefully removed the excess vinyl around the cutout in a process called weeding (I learned that term tonight). Then transfer tape was applied to the vinyl cutouts to remove them from the backing a expose the adhesive backing on the vinyl and allow them to be moved to their final position. Finally, the transfer tape was pressed on the top of the laptop to place the vinyl sticker and then carefully removed, leaving the vinyl cutout behind.