Monthly Archives: May 2016

Pi day t-shirt (free silhouette cut file)

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I designed this shirt for my sister as part of a belated pi day present:

Pi day shirt

This was done using my Roboknife (also known as a Silhouette Portrait Craft Cutter, but that’s way too much of a mouthful to talk about my robotic knife. Well, okay, it’s more of a scalpel, but whatever.) and two colours of heat transfer vinyl (HTV). This is surprisingly nice stuff to work with, once you get the cut settings right on your roboknife.

Here’s the pi day t-shirt .studio3 file. There’s been updates to the silhouette cutting software since this was created, but hopefully it’ll still work.

When you open it up, you should see two pieces in there, reversed because of the way HTV is applied:

View of the pi day shirt pattern in silhouette studio: on the left is digits of pi with a pi-symbol hole in the centre. On the right is the corresponding pi symbol as a separate piece. Both are reversed because they are intended for heat transfer vinyl, which applies backwards.

View of the pi day shirt pattern in silhouette studio: on the left is digits of pi with a pi-symbol hole in the centre. On the right is the corresponding pi symbol as a separate piece. Both are reversed because they are intended for heat transfer vinyl, which applies backwards.

I basically grabbed the first hundred digits of pi, made a nice block out of them, then used the pi symbol to cut a hole so that I wouldn’t be layering things that wouldn’t be seen in the final design. (This tutorial on layering HTV is very helpful if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) If I were going to make this design, I would use a thicker font for the background part, and one that was easier to weed. This looks lovely but it was a pain to pull out the little centres, especially those 0’s with the dots that had to be left behind!

3am math art. Really wishing I'd thought of using a stencil font for this. So much weeding.

A photo posted by Terri Oda (@drterriko) on

Plus, after all that work I’m worried that eventually the lettering will come off in the dryer. My sister says she’s been a bit afraid to wear it and decided to save it for when it would be seen by people who’d appreciate it, and I can’t blame her!

The continuing cardi story…

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The cardipalooza cardi is still coming! It’s been a month and I’ve been knitting it while reading weird gardening texts:

#gardeningproblems

A photo posted by Terri Oda (@drterriko) on

While enjoying my actual garden:

Late afternoon knitting and tea time ☕ Glad to be done work before the sun is gone!

A photo posted by Terri Oda (@drterriko) on

But mostly I’ve been knitting it in lengthy, upset work phone calls as everyone got stressed out about the pending release. (That’s not as photogenic, though it *did* help keep me a bit more even-keeled through the process.)

And my Acorn Trail cardi has been slowly getting bigger:
Cardipalooza proto-cardigan (Acorn Trail pattern)

And bigger:
Cardipalooza proto-cardigan (Acorn Trail pattern)

And bigger (Don’t worry, the shaping isn’t that intense, it’s just rolled over a bit and unblocked):
Cardipalooza proto-cardigan (Acorn Trail pattern)

And soon it will have sleeves:
Cardigan sleeve selfie for cardipalooza

It’s been a learning process. I’ve had to rip back this and that as I did too much knitting while distracted. I’ve had to learn how to alternate balls of hand-dyed yarns. I decided not to knit the sleeve flat and instead do that in the round, which took a few tries before the “seam” of switched yarns looked right to me. I’m terrified that the math won’t work out and my sleeves won’t fit right into the body, because I’ve mostly done top-down seamless baby sweaters and I’ve never had to think about this before, let alone for such a big project. I’m trying to trust in the pattern, but then I mess something up and don’t go back or make a tweak here and a tweak there to make it fit me better and… it’s scary!

But despite the worries and despite the learning process, it’s coming together. I’ve reached the ennui stage of things as I finish off the first sleeve, so I’m eager to be done (and yet, there’s still button bands and sewing to go — next time, more seamless!) but I’m on track to hit the finish line this month!

Mandala bunnies

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I’ve been working diligently on my cardi and more diligently on security for a software release at work, but I did find time in March and April to make a few presents. This pair went to two awesome little girls:

Mandala Bunnies

Their mom tells me there has been much singing of “Little rabbit foo foo” as a result!

The pattern is Easy crochet bunny (Ravelry link) and as promised, it’s pretty easy. Make a couple of round granny square centres and go from there! I did change up the second tail, though, when I realized my first pom pom wasn’t sturdy enough to be age appropriate for the younger giftee:

Mandala Bunnies

Other than the variant tail, I followed the pattern as written, but I kind of think it would be amazing to scale these up a little bit and use a fancier mandala in the front to replace the simple granny square.

Have you seen how amazing crochet mandalas can look? Here’s a roundup of a few free crochet mandala patterns, but that barely scratches the surface. Check out this tutorial and this artist’s crochet overlay mandala patterns and I imagine you might find yourself deep in a “crochet mandala” google image search eventually.

Here’s a few example photos to get your mind imagining the same thing as mine:

Round 33
Overlay crochet potholder
Here's a second #mandalasformarinke

Aren’t they lovely? Overlay crochet is on my list of things to learn; I’m debating doing that with some of my beanie bags now that I’ve collected a few without using them again. But no new projects until I get my cardigan done!