So week two in the Fab Lab brought with it an old friend – Fast Cow! He’s our unofficial, official team mascot and has been for several years; if you want to know the background to that story, feel free to ask me! I was excited for this week because I knew we were making patches with digital embroidery, and quite frankly you can never get too much of Fast Cow. Below is the image that I modified in order to create the patch, and as for a finished version – I’ll have to wait until I see the teammate that stole it from me.

The team’s unofficial mascot – Fast Cow

The whole process of digital embroidery was very straight-forward. It was far less intuitive, however. I’m used to using the Adobe Creative Suite of software: Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, so the lack in program features and capabilities in the software that we were using was a little frustrating. Regardless, the end product came out far better than I thought it would have. I don’t think I’ll be dabbling in the world of digital embroidery anymore than making more patches, but I was incredibly thankful for the shot at learning how to sew.

Quick note about that: Monday was my first time ever using a sewing machine, so I had about 2 hours of experience after class was finished. That night, I came back to the FabLab and created a UofI themed body pillow for my friend’s birthday the next day! Be sure to check out my Twitter for a picture in the near future 🙂

Week 7 was also very productive in regards to our semester project. Nick, Andrew, Pri, and Toheeb created a pressure sensor prototype for the glove. Later in the week Toheeb and I met with Dr. Ian Rice who’s a professor in the Kinesiology department and he gave us some great ideas, and some inspiration to keep moving forward. I’m really looking forward to working with my team, and I am extremely glad that they are willing to help me tackle this task.