IDEAS FOR COZY HOME
My nephew has wanted a custom Rubik's Cube for quite a while now. I thought about using vinyl and using en exacto knife to cut through the pieces so that they would fit on the individual squares. Then, I found custom sticker sets on the Rubik's cube website. They are pretty reasonably priced, around $6 for a kit that will make 10 customized cubes. From reading on the website, it sounded like there was a bit of a learning curve for getting the stickers to print correctly, so I thought that it might be easier to just print my own pictures on sticker paper that I already had.
I was able to download a template from the Rubik's cube website, which is a Microsoft Word document. I tried bringing the photos that I wanted directly into Word, but it was too frustrating for me to size the pictures the way I wanted to, so I saved the template as a PDF and opened it in Photoshop instead. I chose the six pictures that I wanted, cropped them to about 2. 2 x 2. 2, and laid them across the template. There was enough space to do six more underneath, but since I only needed enough for one cube, I just left it blank!
This is what the template looked like with the pictures in it!
And then I used my paper cutter to cut the pictures into the individual squares. Each time I cut a square, I laid it out where it would go so that I could keep track of all the little pieces. Then, I individually stuck each little square sticker to the corresponding square on the Rubik's Cube. I actually had an old cube on hand that the original stickers had come off. (Thanks, Mike) This part did get a little tedious, but the whole project from start to finish didn't take more than an hour. The stickers stuck surprisingly well. I don't think that they will last forever, but I figure maybe in another couple of years I can re-customize it for him with some new pictures.
Of course I didn't get pictures of all of the sides before it was scrambled, but here a couple more scrambled pictures of the other sides:
I think that Mike has had fun trying to solve this. It is a little bit more challenging than a solid color Rubik's cube, so I am excited for him to be able to put it back together! Date: 2022-03-29
