Is it Digital Fabrication?

Vinyl cutting is digital fabrication because it uses software to designate where the vinyl cutter will cut the material. It's pretty much the same as the laser cutter except it uses a blade and can't ingrave.

Designing

It took me a while to come up with a design for my sweatshirt. I didn't really have any inspiration for an image I wanted to depict, so I procrastinated and avoided it. While I was doing this, I went on TikTok, saw an Illustrator tutorial to make shaped text.

I thought this looked cool, so I decided to try it, but I wanted to change the phrase. Since they used a heart shape, I though it could say treat people with kindness, since that fit the character amount, and also was something I could put on clothes and would wear! I went to follow the tutorial.
I started by making a heart out of rounded rectangles.

After that, I looked through Illustrator for a cool font for my text, and after finding one I liked, went through with creating the shaped text.

Because I had so many letters and words it turned out really ugly so I decided to scrap that idea.
I still really liked the saying, and thought that the heart was cool, so I decided to stick with that. I made the text wavy and duplicated a few more hearts before I called it good. I figured I would put the text section on the front of the sweatshirt and cut out the hearts to go on the sleeves!

AND THEN TRAGEDY STRUCK!

Wheaton went fully remote because of covid and the labs closed so I couldn't use our vinyl cutter... :(

The Plan

Madison came up with the plan of using a smaller, portable vinyl cutter that she bought, so I would be able to complete this assignment still even though I was confined to my dorm. I picked it up from outside the old science center and went to try it out. Long story short, it didn't work.

An Attempt was Made

I opened the cutter and looked at the tutorial video Madison had linked in her email. If I'm being honest, it wasn't really helpful in figuring out how to do anything and the lady who was in it talked so slow that I got annoyed, but I did learn how to insert the blade in the machine. I downloaded the software that connected to the cutter, and followed the instructions from the website to connect my computer. I then opened my design.
To test how this software worked compared to the one I was trained on, I previewed my design as it was.

It seemed to be similar to what I used before, so I went about the normal steps, first reflecting the image.

I went to the preview section and changed the material to vinyl, which changed the power settings and frequency for the blade.
I inserted the vinyl to the machine underneath the rollers that held it in place and sent my design.

The cutter started up and went about cutting out my design, and when it was finished... nothing was cut through.
You can vaguely see the lettering on the vinyl itself in the photo below.

I played around with cutting the amount of vinyl I needed first, in case the pull of the roll was doing anything, but that didn't change anything. I did some research to see if there was any reasoning for this, and I saw that one possibility that caused these cuts to be off was that the blade popped out during the cut. You can see it on the far right of the following photo.

I tried to press down on it as it went through the job to see if that would do anything, but it just completely sliced the vinyl.

I played around with the material settings, choosing presets for different vinyl types, and even completely different materials, but none of them worked. Some cut outlines that actually went through to the backing, but these only happened on the edges of the design. The center remained uncut. After playing around with all sorts of things, and wasting more vinyl than I wanted, I decided to call it quits.

Looks like my sweatshirt design will have to wait until next semester! :(