#decorating ideas

Refresh your walls with a fresh coat of paint for a clean, modern look.

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Refresh your walls with a fresh coat and a low voc paint for a clean, modern look.

Now that I'm armed with a UV printer and a cricut, no surface is safe from being printed, stickered, decal'd or otherwise decorated in some way.

The next surface to be attacked, is my humble sewing machine:

My awesome little sewing partner, a brother bq1350

First up is deciding which parts of the machine to decorate. The panel on the right is too complicated to work around, and we don't really want to rub fabric along a printed surface if we can help it, so the proposed layout looked like so:

Stickers along the top front, the harp, and the bottom right.

To make a template, I started by covering these areas of the machine in masking tape, marking an outline, scanning the resulting shapes, converting them to vector, printing them back out, test fitting them, making adjustments, scanning and vectorizing and printing until I was happy with the shapes.

Prototyping with paper because vinyl is expensive!

Once the shapes started looking pretty good, it was time to test fit with vinyl, and here's where some unexpected snags appeared:

Holy crap, this vinyl is nearly transparent!

Firstly, the most readily available temporary-stick material (Oracal 631) isn't really opaque enough to be usable for light-colored stickers - sewing machines have markings all over them. Secondly, its adhesive was too tacky and had a tendency to deform or tear the vinyl when removing it after a few days. Ideally I'd like to dress up my machine for each season, and reuse the stickers at least a few times. This material isn't going to get me there.

I spoke with a friend of mine who works with printable vinyls and he pointed out that there are a few different features of an adhesive vinyl that can help improve its opacity: just using a different formulation for the print surface, increasing the thickness of the material, and using an opaque (grey or black) adhesive. I went on the hunt for other temporary-stick vinyls with various thicknesses and adhesives, and ordered from a vendor called Drytac.

Bingo! Even their 3mil DryTac is almost fully opaque. The 6mil is definitely opaque, but probably overkill in my case. The adhesive also has the perfect amount of tackiness for working with the ABS shell of this sewing machine - it's easy to reposition, but sticky enough to stay put reliably.

So with shapes and materials sorted, I generated some "art" in midjourney, and it's time to get a prototype ready! I first cut out the shapes on the cricut, and then ran the pre-cut vinyl through the printer with registration marks for alignment and 1/4" bleed for misalignment.

And the first skin of many is complete!