When Professor Sachdev told us to meet at the “Fab Lab” for last week’s class, I was expecting a very high-tech building, somewhere near the heart of campus. After my phone had told me that I was still 7 min away at 1:58 I knew that this would not be the case. As surprising as the appearance of the building was, what was inside was even more spectacular. Our class split into two groups, half of the class spent the workshop learning about arduinos and the other half learned how to use the computers to print out an image that would be sewn into a piece of fabric. I was in the sewing group and was actually very impressed with how my design turned out.

We started off by choosing an image from the internet to import into SewArt. I chose the image from my acapella group’s website and decided to add some music notes below it. We had to edit the image before we could sew it because of the multiple colors the image had (I cut mine down from 7 to 3). After this we saved them to USB drives and began printing! My design was pretty accurate and actually printed very easily, the hardest part was threading the new thread through the machine when changing colors.

This was my first time ever using a sewing machine and while I didn’t manually operate it I was still very happy with how it turned out! While this was only an introduction to the Fab Lab I’m very excited to work here in the next few weeks. I believe tomorrow we will switch sides and I will be able to learn more about arduinos and hopefully be able to incorporate them into my designs. Having a software element along with the hardware of something I could print would really make a more interesting project in my opinion. Really looking forward to future workshops here!!