Part One: The Idea and Vinyl Cutter

For this quarter Brooke, Ruthie and I decided to make decal stickers for our cars that signified out friendship, but also were personalized to each one of us. We got this idea from the name of our group chat and Brooke and I’s old shirts we made back in 8th grade. For the old shirts we put the nickname that signified our relationship and then had something individualized, for example I put hockey sticks on mine and Brooke put an old mustang on hers. We loved those shirts and those shirts helped us come up with this idea.

The idea for our project was to write BFB in a big Castellar font to represent our friendship and then as the individualized portion we put our nicknames under each of the letters in the same font, but smaller size. We started creating this idea on the vinyl computer because we got to try a lot of different fonts until we found the one we all liked. We also got to play around with how we wanted each text box to sit. As we started to do this we ran into out first struggle.

The first struggle we ran into was how to line all the text up and group all the text. When we first wrote it out, the BFB was separate from our nicknames. It seemed like it was going to work until we grouped everything to where everything shifted and none of the text was lined up. We spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to get it all just write and we finally did. We came up with the idea (with Docs help) to write each BFB letter and nickname in their own text box, that way we could first group the nickname to its assigned letter in BFB. Once everything looks grouped correctly we saved out work and now it was time to print it out.

When we got to custstudio (vinyl printer) we ran into our second struggle. Our text from coreldraw wouldn’t not paste onto cutstudio. This meant we had to recreate everything on cutstudio now in order to get it to print it out. It became very tedious because we struggled again with grouping and lining everything up. Another reason it was even more of a struggle was because we had to figure what size we wanted the letters to be in millimeters and since this was our prototype we didn’t need it to be that big. It was 130mm by 70mm and the reason this was going to be a prototype was because we didn’t have enough time to order in the right material for a decal sticker.

The material we needed for the decal stickers is a vinyl sticker with a gummed backing so that it is durable enough to last on a car throughout different seasons. We did not have this material in makerspace and we need to order it when our second quarter starts. Besides the minor struggles we experienced and not having the right material the project went better than I expected. It was great to do a project with two of my closes friends because there was so much creativity between the three of us. I would say the biggest struggle between us is how distracted we get with one another. I am excited to see this project develop and post Part 2 of our project next quarter!