Archives for "General Scrapbooking"
Tips For Using Vinyl When Scrapbooking with Cricut
Don’t be afraid of new things
Vinyl cutting isn’t what it used to be. The cricut machine was inspired by machines that cut vinyl in the first place! It knows how to do it, all you have to tell it is what and how hard to press.
Kiss-Cutting isn’t as cute as it sounds!
Kiss cutting is when you want to cut through the vinyl, but not the backing paper. It’s not a huge deal to cut through both but if you want to save time and your fingernails, you have to play with different pressures of your blade to see exactly how hard you must press for each type of vinyl.
How much do you want to spend?
If you want to spend the most money, then certainly go with Cricut vinyl. It’s backed by their satisfaction guarantee and is made specifically for the cricut. I use Oracel 631.
If you want to spend a bit less, try Wall Pops from any hardware store. These are made for sticking to walls, specifically what you want to do with the cutouts.
If you want to spend EVEN less, try drawer liners found at any dollar store or Wal-mart. They come in a variety of colors and hues made to match common kitchen themes.
If you want to spend nothing, try going to your local vinyl and sign-making business and see if they will give you scraps. Who knows if it will be free, but a smile goes a long way in a craft like this!
Try putting Vinyl decals on your cars as opposed to expensive custom logos that you can find at car stores.
White vinyl looks the best on any color car’s windows because of the tinting.
Tempted to use sign or vehicle vinyl on walls?
Don’t do it unless you want to repaint! You can however layer it on top of regular wall-vinyl, but that’s a lot of work!
Try using vinyl on cards and in scrapbooks
Vinyl is actually better for cutting very intricate designs on. Now you can finally cut snowflakes without the cardstock breaking apart everywhere!
If you don’t have any real tools on hand…
Try using credit cards or anything with a flat edge to smooth vinyl securely to all walls, and before cutting, to the mat.
Contact paper, or spray adhesive can also be used as transfer tape depending on how complex your design is.
Transfer tape too sticky?
Stick it to the carpet, your shirt, your cat or your head a few times to let it pick up some lint to de-sticky it.
Hope you found these tips useful, I know I do! For best results, use the Cricut Expression for the largest designs.
Cool Scrabooking Cricut Project I Saw Today!
If you’re confused by cutting Vinyl, check out my other post with some great Vinyl Cutting Tips
You can decorate your walls using any cricut and some vinyl just like you see those expensive kits at Home Outfitters and other home stores. I’m going to show you how to make a beautiful phrase on your wall for any room in the house! If you want to save EVEN more money, I found out that you can use drawer liners bought super cheap at a wal-mart or dollar store. If you want conveneince, you can buy something called “wall pops” from most home stores as well. It’s not too thick and it’s removable without damaging paint underneath and they come in a wide variety of colors and patterns that would certainly compliment any kitchen or dining room.
When you cut vinyl, it has to cut through the paper backing it as well, and you must use the highest pressure, medium speed and blade depth of 5. It will take some playing with though, because not all products are the same. Don’t worry about dulling your blade on this stuff, it shouldn’t be any worse than regular paper or cardstock.
If you’re cutting through Wall Pops, use speed one, pressure three, and blade depth of two for optimal results.
Now also don’t worry if you don’t have the Cricut Expression, because you can cut them on the regular cricut as well! Your letters won’t be able to exceed five and a half inches though. If you have the cricut software for the regular cricut, it allows you to rotate the letters, allowing for larger ones but it would take some playing-with.
This project is just adorable, and simple too if you have the right tools (a Cricut, some vinyl) and a ladder!
You can even design these on the Gypsy, which is what I plan to do when I go to the store to check out colors and textures of the papers. It makes using the Cricut Expression easier to visualize when out of the scrapbooking room!
Converting Images To .SVG or “Vector Files”
I’m going to talk a little about vector art and bitmaps and how they relate to each other.
See my guide for step by step instructions on converting these files for Scrapbooking with Cricut.
A bitmap is a regular image, like a JPG from your camera, or a PNG on a website. Bitmaps are described by a grid of tiny colored squares called pixels. If you want to increase the size of a bitmap, you have to come up with new pixels to fill in the gaps between the original ones. This process is called “interpolation” and it leads to the blurriness or pixelation that you see when you zoom into a bitmap or scale it up to a larger size.
Vector art, in contrast, is described by the mathematical formulas of the shapes that make it up. As a result, the vector art can be viewed at any size without any blurriness or pixelation. It also means that you can change the image in more useful ways. For example, if your vector image contains a circle, you can easily just change the size of that circle, or even transform it into an ellipse (a type of oval). That would not be possible in a bitmap image.
Converting from vector art to a bitmap is easy as pie. In fact, any program that displays vector art has to convert it to a bitmap just to display it on the screen. The technical word for that process is “rasterization.” The opposite process, that of converting from a bitmap to vector art is not so easy. In fact, it is a somewhat ill-posed problem in that there are lots of vector images that “match” any given bitmap, so it is impossible to say which one is correct.
The “standard” way to convert from a bitmap to a vector representation is for a human designer to just redraw the art in a vector editor. This is time consuming and frustrating, but it leads to consistently good results, and it is what people are used to.
The good news is that some new research out of Stanford University has recently changed that for a large group of images. It is called Vector Magic (VM) and they’ve taken it commercial at:
It is not a miracle worker, so don’t think you’ll get a great vectorized result of your scan of a cocktail napkin, but the new tool does work remarkably well on medium- and high-resolution bitmaps that were originally vector art at some point.
And you can try it yourself for free. Just upload an image to their website and it will guide you through a wizard, leading to your vectorized result. The online tool is really slick, but you can also download a desktop version of the software that is free to try (you need to buy if you want to save the resulting files, but you can inspect them in detail with the trial).
Scrapbooking Cricut Pet Inspired Images
Here are some more pet inspired images that you can make into vectors using my guide to then use with Sure Cuts A Lot for use in your scrapbooks and greeting cards.
Hope you find these useful!
Scrapbooking Cricut Winter Inspiration Images
Using my guide on how to create vector images to use in Sure Cuts A Lot, you can save these images and convert them and start scrapping! check out this guide on my site for help.
These ones I found online are beautiful scrapping images for winter scenes and can easily be converted into vectors using my guide.
These pictures of are huge in size and quality, so don’t be scared if they take a few seconds to load once you click on them!
Well I hope you find these useful, I sure did! I’ll post more as I find them for all you scrappers! Reply to my posts if you want something specific, because I’m pretty good at finding stuff!
Awesome Die Cuts to use with Sure Cuts A Lot (and how to make them!)
As I have found out, it is very easy to make .SVG files to use with Sure Cuts A Lot. A .SVG file means that the file is a vector image, which is an image that can be zoomed in or zoomed out and it wont distort, or get blurry at all. This format is what Sure Cuts a Lot uses and there are millions of .SVG files out there for you to use! I will help you find some, and show you how to convert a .JPG, or .PNG image file to an .SVG to the best of my ability.
A great website to use is Openclipart.org which is a directory of images that people have submitted with free licenses to use wherever you want. This website is good for finding images that you may not be able to find on scrapbooking websites. Just by using the search bar in the top right part of the screen, I typed in “leaf” and found this image:
Now, the website gives you the option of downloading a .png file (which I have posted here) or a .SVG file which you can use in Sure Cuts a Lot. Here is the link to the bay leaf image page in case you couldn’t find it. I chose this image because it appealed to me and I think it would look great as an edging around a wedding photo or on the edge of a page.
Ok, so now you want to know how to convert a regular image into one that can be used in Sure Cuts A Lot. It’s a bit more complicated, but not by much.
The best website that I have used is Vector Magic and you get a free trial which is sufficient for this example. If you are satisfied with your result, you can buy “credits” to do more custom images or pay 7.95 a month to do unlimited ones. You will have to sign up for a free account though, but it’s very easy and fairly quick.
Right now, I’ll walk you through making your first vector image.
This is the first thing you will see, start by clicking that button and it will prompt you for an image. I am using this .png file of a green cat. Click the cat here to get the larger image to save.
You will then upload the picture that you want, and you’ll see this. On the left, is the old image and on the right is the newly vectorized image. For this kitty, it’s important to leave it on medium quality setting for the smoothest outline, however if you would like a more realistic edge to the cat, press the high quality button and you will see what I mean.
Now, all that is left to do is download it, by pressing the big Download Result button with the green arrow on it:
Press “Enable Download” if it appears and then choose the Download .SVG Button as seen below:
You will now save the file to wherever you save your scrapbooking images and then use Sure Cuts A Lot to cut that little kitty out! Please play around with the Vector Magic utility, there are so many variations you can do of your image. If you want more pictures to covert into Vectors for Sure Cuts A Lot, just check out my post where I post a bunch of cute .png files that I found.
How Scrapbooking with Cricut Saved My Life
I want to share a story with you about how my Cricut and how scrapbooking saved my life. Two years ago, I had to take a stress leave from work and ended up spending a great amount of time at home, in bed feeling sorry for myself. I went into a great depression and was very unhappy with the way I felt. While finding something to occupy my time, going through old boxes of photos in my closet and sorting them according to date, planning out a picture album. Looking at photos of my family made me feel wonderful and I began thinking of ways to decorate the pages with construction paper and stickers.
Little did I know that two days before, my husband had been on the internet searching for a birthday present for me and he bought me my first Cricut off of Amazon.com. Boy, that was the greatest present that I could have asked for at that moment. He ordered rush shipping (like most men, he left it to the last minute *haha*) and it came fast enough that I was able to open it and try it out on my birthday. That evening, we cut, cropped, resized, and pasted my first scrapbook. It was the happiest day of the year for me, as I was spending time with my kids and husband, reminiscing of old memories and when I look back to that first scrapbook, it’s fairly amateur and messy but it is truly my favorite one.
The following weeks allowed me to gain a new perspective on life, that every memory is worth cherishing and that everything can be preserved and made even more beautiful with the touch of a few buttons, and some borders and dots! The Scrapbooking Cricut machine allowed me to classify, organize and beautify my photos in scrapbooks, as well as saved me tons of money on birthday or Christmas cards by making my own! I find that I can make a card for any occasion in less than 20 minutes, for a tiny costs of paper and a bit of glue instead of spending 5.99 at the local card shop for one made by a machine!
Anyways, thanks for listening to my story. It feels good to be able to talk about the Cricut to other people and shed some light on the best die-cutting machine that I have ever experienced.
Top Ten Reasons Scrapbooking with Cricut is The Best
Top Ten Benefits of Scrapbooking with Cricut
1. You don’t have to have a computer.
The Cricut can be used alone, or with the Gypsy to re-scale, crop and select images to cut. It’s simplicity at its finest.
2. Makes very cute noises when you turn it on
These sounds are rays of sunshine when I turn on my Cricut, and inspire me to make bright and beautiful scrapbooking pages that reflect my sunny outlook on life.
3. The cricut is better eye-candy than other cutters
The light green and light slate are fashionable and neutral to my scrapbooking and craft room. The carrying bag is also stylish, in comparison to the drab black bag of other cutters.
4.With the Sure Cuts A Lot software, you’ll never have to buy another cartridge
If you are short on cash, or crave a design that Cricut does not offer yet, this software allows for a greater range of creative freedom. I would love to design some of my own one day, which could then be converted into the SCAL (Sure Cuts A Lot) format.
5. You can easily upscale and downscale cuts.
This is an amazing feat for the Cricut, as some pictures in my scrapbooks don’t need to be overshadowed by big colorful die-cuts, but accented lightly and daintily by slight effects on the outer edges. The Cricut allows me to do this.
6. The Cricut can cut faster than any other die-cutter.
In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, I have the cuts that I need just as I have prepped my sticky pads or glue sticks.
7. It cuts the longest borders and largest shapes.
You can cut extra long borders which allows for seamless die-cuts that you don’t have to glue together! If you are like me and you need to have neat and tidy pages, the Cricut will make awesome borders.
8. The cartridges carry the most die-cuts in comparison to other cutters
From what I have seen from my friends other cutters is that my Cricut cartridges offer more “bang for your buck” in the sense that they carry more designs and more value is squeezed into that cute tiny cartridge.
9. The Cricut can cut up to .5mm thickness of paper
This is ideal for cutting card stock, glossy card stock, stiffened fabric, and even felt (if you use the multi-cut option). You can surely add a variety of textures and thicknesses to your pages and greeting cards with this feature. Other cutters only go up to .3mm cutting thickness.
10. The blade lasts the longest, at 500-1500 cuts! That’s LOTS!
This is probably the most important feature of them all: Quality. The Cricut screams quality of design, because it’s incredibly durable, not finicky or delicate and you don’t have to be afraid to try new things! If you do happen to break a blade after the thousands of cuts that you do, they are cheap as potato soup! You’ll love it, trust me.
Downsides?
It’s addicting!
My New Scrapbooking Cricut Gypsy
