HTMAA Week 14
Assignment Description:
Design and produce something with a digital fabrication process (incorporating computer-aided design and manufacturing) not covered in another assignment, documenting the requirements that your assignment meets, and including everything necessary to reproduce it.
Wildcard Week - Embroidery gets Ugly
This week I opted for the embroidery wildcard! I had a grand vision of making an ugly Christmas sweater with custom embroidery, conductive thread, and sewn-in LEDs. However, as life came up and my creation materialized, the latter half of that plan never came about. However, I still had a blast and learned a lot!
This week I utilized both pre-made designs from the Amazing Designs CD catalog, as well as a custom-made design created in PEmbroider with the help of ChatGPT.
The catalog contained many candidates for an ugly sweater design, but many were far too complicated/layered. The designs in the reindeer folder struck the balance of cringy and simple. Alec showed me the ropes, and we started with the following design:
Even as one of the simpler designs in the pack, it consisted of 21 color changes and about 2 hours of time in total. Because of all of the color changes and trying to keep the sweatshirt out of the needle, it was a pretty active 2 hours.
Here is the finished product. You'll notice one large oversight: the design is rotated 90 degrees... Oh well. It's supposed to be ugly right?
Next, I wanted to try to make something custom using PEmbroider. I remembered that in this paper the authors experimented with GPT-4 creating a unicorn in TikZ, and creating shapes in PEmbroider seemed pretty similar, so I gave it a shot.
Link to Processing Code to Generate Pattern
After providing the example file from the PEmbroider GitHub repo and asking for code to draw a reindeer, ChatGPT produced the following:
I then asked the model to actually draw the components it identified in the comments
This was great progress already, so I asked it to draw a body:
This looked pretty awkward, so I asked for a side-on view:
These legs look awkward, so I asked the model to make it more detailed:
Finally, I asked it to complete some of the TODOs it left in the comments of the drawAntlers() and drawLegs() functions, giving us our final embroidery render:
Next, I uploaded it to the software, and downloaded it to the memory card. I hit go, and the machine went CRAZY, going at max speed and causing the top thread to come undone a few times.
The stitch tension also appeared to be off, as the white bobbin thread was pulled up on top of the fabric. I was scared of bending the needle or breaking the machine, so I stopped. I'm not sure what happened, perhaps it was the choice of fabric, or something about the way PEmbroider rendered the shapes. Sadly, Alec had COVID at this point, so fixing it was out of my league.
I did one more 90 degrees rotated ugly reindeer and the bobbin thread really ruined it:
I had created something so ugly that it took away all motivation to make it cool.