Today has been one of those days where I’ve done quite a lot, but without producing any cool finished products to point at (yet), or making any actual money (yet). But I definitely have been working hard.
First, I spent a couple of hours sanding wooden baubles. This is not the glamorous end of making things, but it makes a huge difference to the finished product, and I’m producing them at a schedule that should hopefully keep me in stock throughout Christmas this year.
Then I switched over to the my eufyMake E1 UV printer and worked on some Halloween designs.
My UV printing went wrong again…
That turned into another “learning experience” rather than an unqualified success. I was trying to print some earring/charm designs onto 2mm acrylic. Strangely, the first little set of ghost charms worked — but when I tried a larger batch afterwards, things went wrong. The print head seemed to be physically dragging across the images.
After checking the troubleshooting information, it looks as though 2mm-thick acrylic might not be the right material to use in the way I was attempting.
Unfortunately, the failed print also meant another round of manually cleaning the printer, followed by another test print to make sure everything was behaving properly again. So: not a successful product test, exactly, but definitely useful information.
And then this evening I switched technologies again and spent a few hours designing birthday cards for papercutting. Today’s designs included a 60th birthday card, two personalised birthday cards with names on them, and a 90th birthday card.
So that’s been today: sanding, UV printing, printer troubleshooting, graphic design and papercutting. And I did some laundry and made some mackerel pate as well. And listened to a couple of audiobooks.
So, although it didn’t make me any immediate money, hopefully when I send the baubles off to Amazon later in the week, they will start to sell before Christmas. And the birthday cards was a specific commission, so I should get paid for them at some point… plus I designed most of the cards so that I can reuse a lot of the elements in them.