There's printing and then there's printing

We have a 3D Printer. It's a Makerbot 2, if that means anything to anyone. Here's a vine I took of my cutter and the 3D Printer side by side working away.

On Sunday, I drew some fish with a pen on paper. I scanned them into Photoshop, and edited them a bit. Here's one.

I changed it into a vector graphic in Illustrator. Then it looked like this.

Next I exported it into a 3D drawing program called Sketchup, which I got for free on the internet. I thickened the fish into a 3D model.

I exported it to the appropriate format for 3-D printing and sent it to the printer.  It took about 2 hours to print, and cost me $0.87 in plastic.

Voila! It's for block printing. I attached a knob to the back with velcro so that it would be easier to pick up without getting paint on my fingers.  Then I used a brayer to roll on block printing ink for fabric and printed my fish on a piece of cotton.

How much fun is that? I'm rather excited. I'm going to make a cat and more fish and some flowers and a city and probably more fish and and and ...!  Here are some other blocks I made.

Thanks for looking!