Custom Capes
Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2012 7:27 pm
So, I decided to play around with making some custom capes. I tried out the printer fabric and that seemed to work pretty good, there were a couple of things I need to tweak. First, the colors are more washed out on fabric than they are on paper. The reds turned more pinkish than I wanted to, so I need to tweak that a bit. The brown on the forestman cape also came out a bit washed out, so I need to play around with that a bit.
The fabric comes in 8.5 x 11 sheets, and I was curious at how much the ink would bleed through to the other side. It doesn't actually, so you wind up with printing on one side of the cape, and the back is left white with no real way to feed it back through the printer. I also didn't like that the fabric was much more flimsy than the LEGO official capes once you pulled it off the backing paper. So, I tried gluing two halves together and it seemed to solve both problems. I now have printing on both sides, and the glue makes the capes much more rigid like the official ones. The glue also seemed to help prevent some of the fraying when you cut them out. The only drawback is you essentially only get half as many capes per sheet.
Anyway, comments and suggestions are certainly welcome as well as any questions.
The fabric comes in 8.5 x 11 sheets, and I was curious at how much the ink would bleed through to the other side. It doesn't actually, so you wind up with printing on one side of the cape, and the back is left white with no real way to feed it back through the printer. I also didn't like that the fabric was much more flimsy than the LEGO official capes once you pulled it off the backing paper. So, I tried gluing two halves together and it seemed to solve both problems. I now have printing on both sides, and the glue makes the capes much more rigid like the official ones. The glue also seemed to help prevent some of the fraying when you cut them out. The only drawback is you essentially only get half as many capes per sheet.
Anyway, comments and suggestions are certainly welcome as well as any questions.