 We just made these crazy easy acrylic windspinners and we'll show you how we did it right now. What is up? A welcome back. Do it to do a build or make it. So do we. And we have new videos each week every Tuesday and Friday. This week we're taking it to the skies. This week we had one of our top tier patrons had a request for a project. We actually threw a little blast out there asking for requests. So if you've got some let us know. What do you want to see? Leave us a comment. She wants to see some acrylic projects and so do I. And I. Yes we've been wanting to do some stuff with acrylic and we just keep pushing it to the back burner with other ideas. But we're going to do an acrylic series. We've got like three or four things lined up that we're going to do. So this week we're going to do some wind spinners with acrylic. Maybe it's something you hadn't thought about yet. Not just wind spinners Kim. Halloween inspired wind spinners. Well we got to stick with the theme. We got to stick with the season. And did you know you can sublimate on acrylic? I did not. He did too. Only just now. So we're going to show you how to sublimate on these wind spinners. Cut them out of acrylic and show you how quick and easy it is. If you're looking for a quick and easy project for crash shows this project might be it. Step one. We're going to gather all of our supplies. We needed some acrylic because this is an acrylic project. We needed a heat gun so we could heat up the acrylic to bend it. Something to hang the acrylic with. So we have some string and then some hooks to assist the string with the hanging. Or chain. String or chain. And we're going to need some sublimation paper because we're going to sublimate on one of them. At least one of them. That is the biggest sheet of sublimation paper I think I've ever seen. And we're going to be using our heat press. Oh and our X-Tool P2 will be doing all of our acrylic cutting for us. Step two. We're going to create our design. We're going to do our design in creative space. Right you can download a wind spinner design anywhere but we're going to show you how to make your own wind spinner design. It's super easy to do in creative space or I think we're going to show you a quick version in Adobe Illustrator and that way you can make any design that you want. You can use your initials. You can use any graphic that you find on the internet and you can make this shape in multiple different styles and you don't have to just stick to a basic scalloped edge. And I think it'll actually be quicker to make your own than to go out and find one, pay for it and download it. Alright we're going to start in creative space and we're going to make a scallop frame first. That's what Kim wants to do first. So we're going to make a scallop frame. So I'm going to use my circle tool. I'm going to draw a circle holding shift. Now I'm going to go to my array tool and I'm going to go circular array. Now let's say this is the space between them. There's where it's sitting right now and then you're going to step the spaces between them. So start with 10 and 10. So we have five. That was four. I guess I could just use the oh that steps down partial numbers. Well before that let's add some circles. Yeah that looks pretty good. That looks scallopy. Maybe one less circle. I'll tell you in it when we take the film when we fill it and I can see it like that. Oh all right all right. So we'll say okay we got a nice little scallop frame. We'll select everything and we're going to come up combine and unite. That looks nice. It leaves me a hole in the middle and I can't really ungroup it. So I'm going to hide that hole in the middle by putting a circle. We'll shift draw another circle. There's a circle right in the middle and we'll combine, unite. Scallop frame Kim. Wow that was so fast. Fast. Add some yeah that's what add the outside layers. How big do you want the inside? Four inches? Yes four inches. I'm showing him. Yeah he's just showing me with our hands. It looks like to be about four inches. All right now we're going to start to give it its little wind chymeness to it. What is it the spin? Yes the spin. Now we'll give it some spins. Four angies. We'll give it an outline. I don't want the inner outer line, the inner outline. We'll just uncheck that. I think the spaces between the whatever those things are called spleens, splines, things should be about I don't know an eighth of an inch right? Okay works good. So all right now that one's selected and we're going to add another outline but we want these thicker right the actual spleens to be thicker so we'll make those quarter inch we think several too thick. Okay so that's the first that's the spacing and then the next one is the actual yeah that was the spacing and now we're going to make the actual ribs the ribs yeah point yeah I'm going to say we're quarter inch yeah yeah she's holding her fingers out I'm showing him about quarter inch. I have to visually I'm such a visual person I have to look good. All right now I'm going to select this guy and then the one I just made we're going to go up and combine subtract over that. So now look that's all one object I'll even move it over here all one object I'm going to select that and we'll give it an outline again give this an outline my period doesn't seem to work. So when you do that you're taking away taking away the middle it's like subtracting the middle piece from it. Okay this is the long way here in a second I think I'm going to show you how to do it way faster in Illustrator. But you can do it here in Cray Space which is pretty cool. You can totally do it here at Cray Space I mean I was surprised that I was able to do it at Cray Space pleasantly surprised that I wanted to subtract over that. All right I have five of them now. Okay now how big is it? Because I'm going to sublimate on this one and I want the whole thing to be eight inches. Oh you want it to be eight inches? Yes. Let's add another one. Okay. About eight inches. All right. I'm going to insert a rectangle. The rectangle is going to be should I just stop it at the bottom or should it hang past? This is what's going to unite on a little. Stop it at the bottom but you do need to make a little loop for hanging at the top. Yeah so it's let's see make it a quarter inch wide what do you think? Yeah. Whoa four twenty four inches. Periods are important. Whoa let's select everything. I think that's okay up there. Two inches. You can have a little measuring tool. Well you can check the top. So hit the top outer. Well this is just about eight and the whole thing is this one point three inches. Yeah one hundred. I think you need more. No. Okay all right so let's grab everything now. I'll come up to combine and unite. There have it. All right you guys want to see how fast you can do this same thing in Illustrator. All right here's my pumpkin. All right grab my pumpkin's outer line and we'll go object path offset path. We'll say the first one is going to be one two five. Got eighth of an inch. Bam. Actually let's make it a quarter inch. So object I'm going to show you even faster way. Offset path we'll just go straight quarter inch. Round and right. Now I have one. So now I'm going to come over here to my window. I'm going to go to actions. I'm going to create a new action. We're going to call this one action Jackson. All right action Jackson. We got it. Here it is down here. I'm already recording. So I'm going to go to object because I have it selected. Outline offset path quarter inch. Okay I'm going to stop recording now. Now I have this one selected. Just going to hit my little play button. Play. Now how many did you want Kim? What was it five? One two three four five six. So I guess we can let's see how big it is. So the other one had point one two five between them. This one is a quarter inch between them. Well I haven't finished yet. No because I can go ahead and make these. Oh yeah okay. Well let's not do that because I ended up doing the pumpkin face. This is like 10 coin. There you go see. Oh yeah nice. All right how big is that whole thing then? This whole thing is seven inches. Oh seven and a half. About seven and a half. Okay that's fine. That's good. I mean we can go ahead and scale it a little bit. There you go we're at eight inches. Okay looks good. Yes. All right so now we're going to take our line tool. It's where this it's where the spiral is right. It's where the spiral is. It's just everything's got a line. Let's group these guys. These guys. Oh one more time. It's good. Let's group it. Oh I was holding caps. Group these guys. Now we'll grab everything. Make sure everything is lined horizontal. We'll grab everything that's got a stroke on it. I don't think I want to grab this basket. It's going to be solid. Take this. Let's grab everything that's got a stroke on it. Object. I'll grab this guy in the middle now and we'll go into window pathfinder and we'll unite everything. Select everything again. We're going to get rid of this fill and then we're going to stroke it all red. You're right. There you go. Yeah you got it. I was afraid if you were going to get rid of his face for this thing. No it's back there. It's back there. All right let's export this as SVG and let's start saving these. Let's start cutting these things. If you want to see a more detailed version of this or slower we do an illustrator class over on zoom with our top tier patrons every second Tuesday of the month. It's technically a jack-o'-lantern. I already had a jack-o'-lantern. All right Kim said we forgot to include a little hole for the string so I'm going to add a little hole for the string. First let's do a circle. Do the same thing over here. Half inch guy or five inch guy. I'm going to make one more circle. This one's going to be tiny circle. That's what I was thinking but it was like I'll wait. All right let's go and do this thing just like a piece of string. Maybe. I got a little hole. Maybe just a little bit bigger. Just under quarter inch. Two. Yes that's good. All right I'll take this hole. There you go. All right now they have a hole Kim. Perfect. Step three we're going to make all of our cuts. We're going to bring this eighth inch acrylic over to the X-Tool P2 and cut it out. We're just going to use the creative space settings for acrylic. This is a eighth inch acrylic. We got this from our friends over at Cerulean Tides and I think this will be fine for hundreds of colors and packs so you can get packs of colors. They have everything you need for acrylic over there. Time for sublimation. All of our little pieces are cut out of the acrylic. Each one took about seven minutes. They're about eight inches so not a bad cut time. All right and next up will be to add our sublimation print. So I went out to design bundles and I just grabbed a fall image. I liked this one because it had something right in the center and I think that'll be perfect in the center of our little scallop that we made here. I printed a couple of them because we're going to want to sublimate on both sides and what we're going to do is we're going to peel off our paper. We're going to sublimate on this side. Take it off of the heat press and then put something heavy on it and let it cool. You don't want to try and do the bending because we're going to need to sublimate on the second side. Once it's cool and everything is back to stiff again, we're going to put it back in the heat press and sublimate on the other side. Take it off, put something heavy on it, let it cool. It does tend to warp. That's why you're going to want something nice and heavy on it as it cools down. Then once both sides are sublimated then we'll do the bending process. We're only going to sublimate on one of these today. All of mine are non-sublimation. This middle part, just the middle part on the top and bottom that we want to bend. We're going to heat it up with the heat gun and then try to bend it in place. Right. You don't want to put this in the whole heat press because everything, even the centerpiece will get soft and it'll be a little too malleable and I'm not sure we can keep it in its shape. So by just... We need some controlled softening. Yes, so by just doing this center section here, we should be able to twist it and let it cool and it'll stay in that shape, I guess. Let's see. A couple more of those. Then I'm going to pass out. Oh, I think it's dry. Oh, look at that. That was pretty easy. Let's do the other ones. One, two, three. Malleable. She's a ghoul. That's cool looking. We're just going to use some of this bead cord. It's like jeweler's cord stuff. Like it's got a little sparkle to it. I think this one's, yeah, it's stretchy. I figured we'd give it the most spin. Maximum spin. Max spin. All right, so we're just going to put this stuff through the hole and give it a knot, and then I have my little spider. I'm going to put him in here and give that little knot. Kim's going to show me how to make this knot. How long you think about it? That long? Let's go and loop it through. What I was telling Garrett is I suggest tying the two, bringing the two ends up and just putting them together. It just makes for a little cleaner knot. But will it spin his spinny with two instead of one? It will hold it. I might need to burn it. There it goes. What do you think? Are you getting spin? Let's see some of your ship knots. I thought we've discussed this. I don't know ship about any knots. I thought you were in the Navy. I was in the air part of the Navy. I didn't tie boats down and not did anything. It's just a knot for knot's sake. It's a not for it. It's a show knot. That's a show knot. So I think all in, we're about like $7, $7.50. Yeah, I think you can get a sheet of the acrylic for less than $10. You can get two of these out of one sheet of 12 by 19 acrylic. That leaves it at about $5 for materials. And then they cut in like seven minutes. Yeah, it was a seven minute cut. So it was like a dollar, $1.50 in laser time. And you can sell these anywhere from $15 to $25. It depends on personalization, what you've got going on. These are pretty simple. Yeah, sublimating the personalization would be super easy. Yeah. Throwing somebody's name on there like that. Yeah, super easy. I think they're pretty cool. I do too. I think they came out great. I think they were quick. I think the longest time was the design, right? Yeah. It was easy. I showed you guys how to make an easy design. So if you are not going to join us for the patron after show, like all these guys, our patrons, we love you guys. We will see you next week where we'll do it, build it and make it again. And don't forget to pop in on Tuesdays where we do a test cut Tuesday. We test something out, see if our design works live. I'm going to go hang these things up. Well, I'm going to go hang these up in the wind.