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Vinyl records

Design process

I went through my old drawings to find a picture that could be a rad sticker. I found one with a skull flower in it, where the background would be easy to remove and was simple enough for a two color sticker.

I opened the drawing with Clip Studio Paint with which I had originally draw the image, and removed all other layers except the flower itself. I saved that image as a separate .png file.

I opened Inkscape, imported the skull png file to it, and then used Trace Bitmap tool to vectorize the image. I played around with the settings a bit to find good balance between the black areas and white areas, and where the outlines lied. The outlines were important, as those would be the lines cut by the vinyl cutter. To get the outlines to pop, I removed fill color from the image and added stroke color.

Removing the spine from the image was annoying. Removing most of the nodes was easy, but for some reason Inkscape would not let me join the last two points with a straight line. I do not know why. After playing around a bit with the settings, the join with a straight line button started working, and I managed to fix the issue.

In the end, I decided to cut the shape so that the petals, eyes, nose and the small flower would remain dark and be stickerable, and everything elso would be removed. In the end, I think this was a bad idea, as it created a couple of separate small pieces (the nose, the flower and the left eye) that had no support from the rest of the structure.

I scaled the image to be 40mm x 40mm in size, so that it would fit in the back of my phone.

Cutting

I moved the saved svg file to the computer in the FabLab, and began cutting.

The vinyl cutter machine required the following steps:

  • Turn it on.
  • Put the vinyl sheet into the cutter.
  • Adjust the rollers to the marked spaces, so that they still pressed against the sheet.
  • Press the rollers agains the sheet.
  • Select edge from the machine, and press enter.
  • The machine will now automatically detect the bottom left edge of the sheet, and set the origin accordingly.
  • Open the cuttable file with Inkscape and press Print.

Following these steps the vinyl cutter spat out the sheet, without cutting anything to it, and then machine would throw an error saying that the sheet was ejected. After tryint out these steps a couple of times, I needed to ask for help. The steps needed to be adjusted, so instead of pressing Print, the step should have been:

  • Select the extension for Vinyl cutter in the Inkscapes extensions. This would open the vinyl cutter manager with the proper file.
  • Press ctrpl+p or Cut from the newly opened window.

Magic!

Adhesive

Couldn’t find transfer tape, so I just took the vinyl apart piece by piece with tweezers, and glued them on the back of my phone.

The cutter had torn up the upper petal a bit, the details were probably a bit too fine for the cutter there.