alhjc6

My daughter's Spanish teacher is due with twins any moment now. I am hoping that someone on the board knows some kind of cutesy Spanish sayings that I can apply to a tile. Thanks in advance! Patty

That is adorable. What font do you use for that? However, since they are having twins, saying four feet might sound like they added a puppy!!! Thanks in advance!

St. Louis has many claims to fame (some good...others...not so much). But, for those who have visited and tried our famous Gooey Butter Cake, below is a link to the recipe on the St. Louis Post Dispatch website. http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/lifestyle/recipes.nsf/recipes/story/93B891AFD60256FE8625756D00714884?OpenDocument If you have never had Gooey Butter Cake, you gotta try it.

Here is another rock. I figure I won't have to buy another Mother's Day present or wedding pressent for quite some time! Here is the set-up for a banner we are doing. My 7 year old was asking me what SNIP means. Hmmm....I am not looking forward to the tween/teen years! http://i659.photobucket.com/albums/uu318/alhjc6/Sign%20Stuff/snip1.jpg[/img] PattyT

Love, love, LOVE the hot pink!

Hey Luder! Posting a pic is OK. I have had issues with posting on the server, so I opened a photobucket account. You can share the pic from photobucket by copying the [/img] link into your message.

The banner looks nice, Jen! I am doing a 4x8 and charging $140. The guy didn't even blink! $85! Wow! That covers cost, but not time! Have a great day! PattyT

Nice, Muttley! I do Shotokan Karate. There is no such thing as a free uniform (as the flier suggests)!! If you go for two weeks, you will earn it!!! PattyT

On rocks, we definitely use sandblast mask. I got a roll of Blastlite from R&J Sign in St. Louis. It works OK. We tried to use just stencil mask, but that is WAY too thin for rock. It got the heck blasted out of it and we couldn't blast too deep. Plus, we had to re-mask the parts we didn't want to paint because the stencil got pock marks in it. Regular paint stencil mask, or even old scraps of vinyl, work great on glass, though! The refine I have works pretty good on the blastlite. It is REALLY thick. I have to use a 60 degree blade to cut it and I think I put the pressure around 150 or so. Plus, I cut pretty slowly. Hartco is a pretty popular blast mask on the sandcarver forum. However, my supplier carried Anchor Blastlite and a bunch of more expensive stuff. This stuff cost me around $60 for a 15" x 10 yd roll. The biggest problem we had working with the blastlite was that it was hard to get it to pull off the release paper. We tried a couple of clear tapes I have. It didn't even stick, hardly. We tried a paper mask from SW. That didn't work. We finally got it to pull away using RLA4025(?). We have a cheapie Harbor Freight blast cabinet ($259 in yesterday's flier). We use aluminum oxide also from Harbor Freight. I haven't really found anywhere else to get different blasting media. Some people use regular sand, but I have heard that regular sand can make a person sick. We also use just old krylon or whatever we have handy in a rattle can. The guys on the sandcarver forum use lithichrome. I haven't investigated it yet because I am still pretty wet behind the ears! Some of that stuff is supposed to be good for 30 years! The rocks are ones we pick up at the garden shop for about 25 cents per pound. So, a good size rock like that one (about 10" long and 8" tall or so) cost me about $5. That is a pretty cheap mother's day present if you ask me. I have to say that I like doing vinyl signs. And, I LOVE doing the blasting stuff. It is fun to see a plain old rock turn into a piece of art (ok...not so much art, but you know what I mean) with the aid of an air compressor and a blasting gun! PattyT

We just use garden variety krylon. The guys at the sand carving website use Lithichrome (I think that is how it is spelled). It comes in aerosol and regular cans. We haven't progressed past Wal-mart yet. We are still playing. But, we used hunter green and white. The white about caused a divorce because I had him put an extra coat on. Oh well...maybe I'll stick to designing and cutting and he can do the rest! Thanks for looking! PattyT

Very nice!

Anyone have any cutesy sayings to go along with the hands and feet? Patty

OK...we have done some glasses and they turned out pretty good. We did a little bitty rock from our Tennessee (go John!) vacation and that turned out pretty good. So...we trucked down to the local garden store and paid 25 cents per pound for some rock to play with. Attached is our first one. It isn't the best because the sandblaster started acting up just after he got the first line done. It blasted through the mask a little bit so it was tricky to paint. At first we couldn't get the mask to stick. Then, I remembered someone told me to spray the rock with hairspray. It stuck then!!! He painted it, peeled the mask and then clear coated it. It isn't the best work, but we are OK with it! What do you think (Nona, give it to me straight, I can take it!!!). Ooops...here it is!! PattyT

Oh...I am not too well versed in tool lingo. That is what DH is for. But, here goes. The blast cabinet came with a gun-looking thingie (had a trigger on it). On the end of the gun, there is a ceramic nozzle where the aluminum oxide(AO) comes out (I know that nozzle is the name because I just bought some off of ebay!). The cabinet has a pickup tube that picks up the blast media (AO); this pickup tube hooks to the gun, as does an air line from the air compressor. Click on the link below for a looksee at what we have http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=93608 It isn't necessarily high quality, but it seems to work ok for us! Good luck! PattyT

The picture is back. I need to learn not to mess with my photobucket account!

Hey Hardcase! I am pretty new to vinyl cutting and just in the last month or so jumped into a little bit of sandblasting. Here is what we have: Refine 24" cutter, harbor freight blast cabinet, 5 or 6 gallon air compressor To do glass, we use vinyl scraps as mask. We also have no trouble doing glass with the small compressor. It is pretty cool to transform a 99 cent glass from the Dollar Tree into a personalized item. My husband even got fancy and frosted the bottom of a glass and it looked REALLY cool. We have done a few rocks and that is a little trickier. We tried using a stencil mask that was made for painting. Did not work out so good. It blasted the heck out of it. And, the compressor had some trouble keeping up. So, I contacted my supply company and asked them for a sample of some Anchor Blastlite. I haven't done anything more than hit it with the test cut on the refine, but it seemed to cut fine with a 60 degree blade and a pressure of about 200 or so. It is expensive, but I figure that we can cut a lot of wedding/mother's day/christmas presents with that! The other day, a friend of mine brought over a water bottle (one of the $5 from Wal-Mart that is the lexan-type plastic). We didn't know if we were going to blast through it or what, but we slapped some mask on it and away we went. My DH was able to blast my friend's name into the bottle and it looked great! Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of it. But, I will get a picture of the 12 more that she wants me to do for a birthday party (cha-ching!). I actually enjoy the blasting a lot more than the vinyl sign bit. It is fun to watch our creations come to life in that blasting cabinet! Hope this helps! PattyT

Here is the jpg of a project I did for my daughter's reading teacher. What do you think? OK...Here is the real thing!

I forgot to mention... We are going to put this in black vinyl on a sandy colored 8x10 ceramic tile

I wish I could contribute more. But, alas, I am still learning (aren't we all). I don't like to ask many questions ('Keep your mouth shut and let everyone assume you are an idiot or open your mouth and remove all doubt' is my dad's favorite saying!) because sometimes I don't feel like I am well-versed in the lingo. But, any time I have had a question, I get an answer. I have even sent a few PMs for those 'this is too embarrassing to ask in public' kind of questions. I have always gotten nothing but positive answers and encouragement. If it weren't for you guys here on this board, I would still be cutting test squares! Someday, maybe I, too, will be able to contribute. But, for now, I am thrilled to check in many times a day during work and see what everyone else is doing! PattyT

Can someone give me an 'Idiot's Guide to Grounding the Refine' lesson? The directions were pretty much lacking any information on where to hook either end of the ground wire (AND, I didn't find a ground wire with my machine). PattyT

Here is a banner I am doing. I didn't pick the colors. They are company colors (orange and green). I threw the black in because I couldn't stand it. Anyway...I need your opinions/ideas/compliments/criticism (any and all!). Thanks! Patty

He has to get back to me. I need to contact him to make sure it is a go. He is a friend so I don't want to push him too much. But, I don't want to wait for the last minute, either. I pretty much did as you all suggested. I moved 'Proud Sponsor' and 'Gabe Alberici Memorial Fishing Tournament' to the bottom. He wanted 'Illinois' on one side of the truck and 'Missouri' on the other. He asked if he could peel the 'Proud Sponsor' and '...Fishing Tournament' off the bottom. I told him he could but the banner would look crappy. Maybe I should try to sell him another one without that stuff on it. They do a lot of community stuff so it would get lots of great exposure! Thanks for asking!

Daniel, Here is the pumper file. Sorry it took so long pumper1.eps pumper1.eps

Those are awesome! Too bad we don't live in those days anymore. With my body type, I would be a hot chick instead of a dumpy broad!!!!!

I know this is sort of off topic. We use vinyl to do a little sand carving. Honestly, I prefer that to doing signs any day! Anyhow, I have been reading A LOT about this RapidMask stuff that will allow you to use a printed graphic and a photo sensitive film to create an adhesive stencil (for lack of a better term). So, my question is this: Have any of you ever used it? Is it as easy as it looks on the videos? Thanks! PattyT