Silhouette Cameo, Curio, Portrait or Mint and Glowforge Love

First up was some coasters for our vacation rental home in Palm Springs. Dealing with small letters on vinyl is kind of a pain!

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those look great! is that vinyl, or did you use the machine to make stencils that you colored?

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Those are awesome Mike! (I love retro!) :grinning:

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Thanks! I cut vinyl as a stencil, transferred it to the cork (not so easy), then hit it with some black spray ink.

Thanks Jules - so do we! :sunny:

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That’s a nice design, I love retro too! :sunglasses:

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haha that explains it! i zoomed in and was like hmmm that texture is too nice for vinyl…

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I keep thinking “this will be so much faster with a laser”!

Our neighbors there kinda keep an eye on the house when it isn’t being rented and they have a nice outdoor bar setup in their backyard. My wife just saw these and said I should make some for them as a thank you for watching over the house. I told her that’s a great idea…once I get the GF!

Last one for today. Need to come up with some textless designs to speed this along!

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Nice job! The cork doesn’t show any paint-bleed, that’s sweet. Porous materials can be a real pain to stick vinyl onto. I find that sometimes sticking transfer tape down and peeling it back up a few times can take off the dust and loose particles and make the vinyl more likely to adhere fully… but it looks like you’ve got it figured out!

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Great suggestion. Thanks for sharing.

I will have to remember that if I have bleed issues. I carefully used their little spatula to separate the transfer paper from the vinyl, so maybe that helped a bit. Or I wonder if maybe spray ink is less prone to bleed than spray paint?

Bleed and adhesion are two separate issues.
I’m gonna guess that cork is wicking the ink downwards, and not sideways because there is no sideways grain for it to wick along through. So no bleed under the well-adhered stencil = due to cork.
You could also be quite right about ink not bleeding as much as paint, although I would imagine that would vary with the quality of the ink/paint (the higher the pigment content, the better) and the carrier that is used for it (alcohol, water, oil, solvent, etc.)

If you didn’t have good adhesion, you would be more likely looking at underspray. you see this a whole lot with non-adhesive stencils. Here is an example. It can be used as a technique to achieve blurred lines, or out-of-focus elements, but generally you want sharp lines on a stencil and underspray is not welcome.
Worst thing with poor adhesion and spraypaint (or sandblasting) is when the whole stencil rips off your surface from the force of the spray media. :tired_face:

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