Apparently I have lost all my commuter immunities, now that I live in a low-contact home bubble, because I went down with a dreadful cold following my trip to London. Wednesday was a complete write off, Thursday not a lot better. I'm feeling more energetic today although still bunged up. At least I had our brilliant new telly to watch, which is still a marvel to behold. And I kept busy with cross stitch (in between naps) so have almost finished the next house in my Houses of Britain SAL. This is house 7 of 14 and I still need to do the backstitching that will add the detail.
[here follows several photos of 3D printing - if this is boring for you, skip ahead]
My first attempt was a 1:12 scale Japanese style table, which I printed at 60% to make it 1:20 scale. It came out great but a little tall, more coffee table height than Japanese sitting-on-the-floor height. I laboriously worked out how to cut 2mm off of the height in Bambu Studio and printed two more shorter ones. Then with much more labour, I eventually managed to contract the length to make it into an end table, and printed four of those.
The next attempt was to take what was described as a 'thumb size teapot with lid' and attempt to print it to 1:20. The first attempt was too big (plus I promptly dropped the lid on the floor and lost it forever), it's the one on the right. Then I scaled it down further to get a better size on the left but the .4mm printer nozzle was leaving blobs. So I had to learn how to change the hot end nozzle to the .2mm instead. That produced much better quality teapots. So I printed more of those, and then found a 1:12 scale crockery set that had handle-less cups that looked Japanese, and printed a bunch of those plus some food bowls and small plates.
Then I tried my first design attempt in Tinkercad, a simple wall shelf. This took me probably over an hour but printed ok. Then I watched some more videos to improve, and had a go at designing a small lacquer tea tray in two colours with cut-out handles. I printed a prototype, tweaked it a bit to enlarge the handle openings and reduce the base thickness, and then printed several of them to use in my Japanese inn. I was incredibly proud of these, and not something I could have made very well from scratch. I gave them a coat of Satin varnish for a bit of lacquer gloss.
Then I could make up tea sets:
Looking through the photos I took in Japan, I found some pics of large storage jars from museum displays. It's basically a flower vase shape, so I found a flower vase file, took it into Tinkercad and added handles and a lid, and printed it at a suitable height for a large jar.
That worked fairly well so I tried reducing it to 75% to print a small version. The first one printed perfectly. The next half dozen kept failing halfway through, leaving me with a lot of 'spaghetti' extruded filament and some interesting half jar shapes that look like big bowls. Eventually I worked out that the shape needed more support, so bodged in an internal support in Tinkercad and enlarged it back to 80%, and was able to print two more. I'm going to paint them to look like ceramic (hopefully) but so far have only primed them.
I went through more Japanese photos and then looked for free files online, to print some sushi platters. While I am loving the semi-instant gratification and the ability to instantly scale things to size, this print started to fail as well when one of the platters (foreground) detached from the print bed. Luckily our printer has the capability to pause, tell it to ignore the failed object, and to continue to print the remaining platters which all turned out fine.
At the moment, I am experimenting with printing 'baby yoda eyes' for my knitted doll, trying to achieve something that looks cute rather than creepy.
Meanwhile DH has been attempting to print far more complex items, starting with a model German soldier that had a lot of sticky-out bits that needed extra supports printed. He's having more issues, trying to refine the models for better quality and less intrusive support fixtures, without yet knowing what parameters to adjust. More spaghetti prints. But we are both learning and it's more fun than not.
I've been pottering away on the 1:24 Caravan kit. The modifications look a bit crude but ok I think, although there are a couple of odd bulges in the wood pieces I soaked to bend them to the new round shape. But it's supposed to look like an old caravan, anyway. The kit was to make this boxy caravan with a roof opening:
But I've given it a rounded nose and a side opening instead:
Before I fell ill, I installed the new thread guide on my longarm and got back to quilting. I'm doing yet another Baptist Fan, this time on my wonky Double Wedding Ring quilt. The Baptist Fan pattern is very forgiving at smoothing out most irregularities while at the same time holding everything together evenly. I'm about halfway through the quilting now (this photo is just the first row) and apart from a few areas of fullness, most of the quilt is looking much less wonky now which is pleasing.
I have corresponded with the dealer about the engineer visit, carefully as they are the only dealer and it wouldn't do me any good in the long run to fall out with them. I'm being billed for one hour, which is less time than she spent here so I'm just going to pay it. I've also got the machine booked in for an overdue general service in a few months, we will drive it down to the main dealer for them to do.
Last weekend I started on a project to use up the last remaining larger pieces of my handwoven cloth. In Japan I had picked up a pattern for a fabric box with a clasp frame top. I had just enough cloth to cut out the body piece, and I created a lid by piecing together three other pieces. I used fusible fleece for the stabiliser - I think the shape would have benefited from something a little stiffer as the metal frame is heavy but I was worried about the fabric becoming too thick to fit into the frame when I was already using a thick handwoven cloth. It was a bit of a job to force the cloth into the frame as it was, but got there in the end. It's a useful size. I've never seen these frames in the UK, the lip is horizontal for the lid, but vertical for the box base.
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