Laser Cut Applique

This is reprinted from my older blog, dated October, 2008, with minor edits.

One of the best purchases I’ve ever made was my desktop laser made by Full Spectrum. I’ve used a variety of laser cutters, big and small, but my favorite feature of the FS lasers are their driver…. The lasercutter looks like a printer to the OS. If I click “print” in Microsoft Word, it gets sent to the FS driver. Magic.

I bought the laser for rapid prototyping, I’ve made enclosures of all shapes and sizes, I’ve also used it for my graffiti street art project. I’ve tried to cut anything I could find which would fit within the build area (even with a magnet hack on the sensor to work with the lid open (do not try this at home). It is through this “materials experimentation” phase that I started to do applique on some of my clothing. Keepin’ it steezy without spending all my duckets.

The process contained a bit of adventure, sometimes melting materials, and sometimes causing a little fireball. I found some practices that helped me with different materials. The top tip from me would be the use of paper tape. I got cleanly cut edges from many textiles I could not hit with the laser directly. By applying one layer of paper tape to the material, and cutting through both, I avoided a singed edge on light materials or the melting of synthetic materials. This is great to test your speed vs strength, then you can prob forego the paper tape.

As a kid of the 80’s, I grew up with iron-on letters commonly found at local shops and flea markets… You could buy a blank snapback hat, sweatshirt/hoody, or Tshirt to get letters heat pressed. You could also bring your denim jacket or whatever. If you were in a breakdance crew, you might have rocked your crew’s initial’s on your hat. I remember paying $7 at a shop on Coney Island ave, off of Kings Highway (same side as Crazy Eddie, diagonal from Kingsway cinema) for a snapback with 3 letters. It was next door to my local comic book store, so I was over there lot and got plenty of things iron-on’ed over time. I can recall my first iron-on was November, 1985 because I also bought Web of Spiderman #8, with the black symbiote known as Venom on the cover. Good times.

I found a great thermal transfer material (aka iron-on paper) sold by the roll, which worked very well for me while trooping around the area below Canal Street that used to play host to many textile shops (a few still exist there). Here’s the process. 1- with the paper backing still attached to one side of the thermal paper, I used an iron at its hottest setting (no steam) to adhere the sheet to the backside of my material. 2- I then applied painters tape (when required by an uncooperative material) to the front side of my material, creating a kind of sandwich with my applique material in the middle. 3- At this point, I’m ready to laser cut the sandwich. I do so with the painters tape facing up. 4- After cutting, I remove the painters tape from the front side, and remove the thermal backing sheet from the backside, exposing my design cut from the final applique material with a shiny layer of thermal glue adhered to the backside. 5- with the iron, I proceed to adhere the cutting to a finished garment, pictured are a couple of shirts and a sweatshirt. I used a thin towel (an old t-shirt would also work here) in between the iron and my applique to prevent cooking the garment or the applique to a shine. This also prevents and glue from reaching my iron’s hot surface.

Viola, the latest in maker fashion 🙂