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Knitting Machine 1

Woo Hoo! I am working on a Brother CompuKnit III programmable knitting machine. With many a grand idea about connecting to a raspberry pi etc, I have been trying to learn the basics, human style first.

I can hand knit. Usually. It’s been a while. I can crochet for about 15 minutes before carpal tunnel flares up.

Today I finally “mastered” the Tuck stitch instructions on the Brother. By repetition I have also learned to cast on and bind off pretty well now. I can now make hundreds of wash cloths…

  • What the tuck?
  • Success!
  • The other side of swatch
Mastering the Tuck stitch…
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Blog Workbench

Sometimes you just have to build a robot

cute wifi car

Thimble.io is one of my favorite kit makers.  I am very behind on my kits from them, so I decided to jump into Robotics Kit 1 today.  It is a cute little wifi car with two wheels and a front balancing bearing.  With distractions and not fully charged batteries causing issues I was finally able to get ThimbleBot01 rolling around with it’s basic web interface on my phone in an afternoon.  I had to take some parts from previous kits as intended by the kit designer they all build on each other, and run to the store for a 9v. 

The kits have all been Arduino based so far, and I just noticed they have a Thimble Blockly coding section on their Learning pages which will really help our youngest and newest coders.

Next build day, I will be continuing to follow the tutorials for modifying the web interface. I love the way the bright orange boxes build on each other, explain the science behind what they are doing, and have great support direct from the designers, there is also a supportive community forum and great instructions (if you read them)…

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Blog Workbench

Craft+Sip Wood Embroidery Ornaments

That, was a really fun event.  I am including here the instructions in case you attended and lost yours.

I learned that makers will follow the directions literally so that I need a test case person to try to follow my directions.  For instance there were a lot of red and green snowflakes because I used those colors to code the directions.  Updated directions coming soon(tm) in the meantime…

makeLivelyCrossStitchTutorial01Download file with finished photos of sample projects
makeLivelyCrossStitchTutorial02Download file with pattern suggestions

I will be posting these kits for sale, contact me directly for now if you need them soon.

Place setting for the Craft+Sip, 2 hour session might be enough time to finish one, but guests got to take home the set.
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Blog Workbench

Wood and Embroidery

Coming soon December 2018, Wood Embroidery Ornaments!

Join us locally to make three of these ornaments! Get Tickets. The Event will be held at our first pop-up make and take benefiting the California Center for the Arts, Escondido.  Come eat, drink, make and be merry.  December 6th, 2018

This month I made custom designed ornaments using Adobe Illustrator, a Laser Cutter, Eagle Works, needles embroidery floss, and lots of Netflix…  Turns out these little guys take a long time to stitch up after a long time of designing the color patterns.  They really turned out nicely though.  These are the samples, now that the proof of concept is done I get to go churn out a whole lot of these, fine tune them a bit and make them into kits.  

Here is a great link to a tutorial on  How to Cross Stitch. She also has an amazing Etsy Store of projects!