DIY T-Shirt printing? No Problem! (almost)

Starting to lift the outsets of the film on the medium...

After a long dry season of posts here on blog.kanojo.de i proudly announce yet another garage-tinkering-tutorial: How to print t-shirts yourself. While this may not sound special or new at all, the technique we’ve chosen required a lot of fine tuning to yield *PROFESSIONAL* (and by that i mean really really REALLY good) results. So i considered it worth sharing.

 

While i must admit that i make a equipment-assumption that may not be the case for most, you can work your way around it. What i’m talking about is that recently a cutting plotter moved into this household. A cutting-plotter is almost like a normal plotter – except that it doesn’t paint or print the paths (read: vector-files) you give it, but cuts. For those who don’t know what a plotter is – imagine a printer that is able to print on a infinitely long roll of paper and doesn’t print per line, but prints a arbitrary path (e.g. a sphere, bezier curve, etc.) at a time.

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Wooden Drinholder for cult drinks

As another birthday of a friend came up and we stood there with not even the slightest idea of what might make a good gift we had to get a little creative – first came the idea of collecting some nerdy and culty drinks (non-alcoholic, i think in this respect non-alcoholic has way more style) and well, give him a set of cool drinks. Next were some thoughts about how to package it and well, while thinking about some cardboard setups to pack it up the idea for this wooden drink holder which can be dual-used as a drinkholder shelf.

See the pictures below for the whole drink collection as well as the drinkholder and both put together :P.

(some building details inside!)

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Say hi to the KanojoFrame!

Hi and welcome to a new full fledged (i at least hope so) tutorial to hack together a fast-switch picture frame, our so-called “KanojoFrame”. As i must admit the idea is not fully genuinely ours, we designed and built it with the moo-frame from the excellent business-card supplier moo.com: Moo Mosaic-Frame.

The idea is to have a frame thats front glass plate is dismount- and mountable in the glimpse of a eye thus allowing to change the contents without too much of a hassle. The other aspect is that the whole content of the frame is made up of a mosaic of mini-pictures framed by small but thick cardboard frames. You can then use cardboard spacer to lay the small framed image-“cards” (moo.com are half business cards, ours are roughly creditcard-size) out in every way you want to create a nice compilation of the works displayed!

The frame itself is quite flat, 6mm without glass, rougly 8.5mm with the glass front attached. The glass it held by a couple of strong rare-earth magnets and sits very tight, so no worries about falling glass. The inner frame can hold around 7*3(=21) of our cardboard-mini-frames, but … see for yourself! And if you feel like it, make one yourself….

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Backlit Couch/Coffee-Table

Have you ever wanted a cool couch- or coffee-table? Something you’re friends will be like “wow”, that blends nicely into your existing room and that makes a nice comfy atmosphere?  Too bad something like that isn’t available readily made at IKEA or the like … but hey, we can tinker it together ourselves!

That’s what we thought when we started to plan that table. Another nice thing about it: It’s extensible, you can always mod in a LED matrix and a matrix-cabinet and start displaying pixel art, a ticker or whatever you feel like … but first you need the basic hardware, and thats what this post is about!

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Something green for your flat

You may have some dark or darker places in your Flat/Room/House/Whatever – or – as i do – a complete souterrain flat. Now you may have tried having some indoor plants in there – just to make the rooms nicer. It just didn’t work, so you put ’em into trash and never tried again.

Well, maybe i just exaggerated a bit, it isn’t that worse most of the time. Still its kinda difficult growing and hatching nice plants virtually anywhere. As i like some green around me and *am* living in a dark souterrain flat i’ve put some reading and discussion with biologists into this and i think i’ve got it how to make that work by now.

First off you need to choose the right plants. Not anything is suited for this kind of enviroment, but some nice ones are spathiphyllum, ficus (benjamini), yuca, phoenix (dactylifera), calathea, dracaena, various ivys, but there are many many more. Just check your local library for nice books on that topic – believe me, books are way better than interweb for this :).

Of those examples i have the following ones around:

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