Sunday, September 4, 2011

Sympathy Card Using Cut Files Made For My Acrylic Stamps


A co-worker's father died this past week. While I have a stash of sympathy cards, I had bookmarked one on Michelle's I Stamped That blog a short while ago so I decided to scraplift it for a new card. I also used the card as an opportunity to try using my cricut to cut shapes to match my stamps. This is what I got:

While I'm not overly enamored with this card, I'm so excited about the flowers on it because I cut the shapes to outline a stamp set I own using my cricut (I only wish I was better at centering a stamp on a cut image). It was quite a challenge to come up with the cut pattern to match my stamps. If you try it, I would really recommend using a stamp with clean lines for your first try. The distressed stamp set I used was really challenging. After several attempts to figure out how to do it with this distressed flower stamp set, I finally found that scanning the carrier sheet for my pattern worked better than trying to stamp the image then scan it or trying to draw around the outline to make up for the distressed nature. Then I followed Creations with Christina's steps in Photoshop from this video, but found I had to do a little extra clean up due to the distressed nature of the stamps. But even then, the cutting lines were still a bit too jagged when I tried to import it into SCAL. So this evening I found that I could solve that problem by saving the Photoshop image as a bitmap then importing that into Inkscape. There I traced the bitmap to smooth the cutting lines as if I was trying to make a piecing file from an image. Once the bitmap was traced, then I could save the file and open the svg in SCAL. It took me several hours of trial and error, but eventually I had a SCAL file with cut files for all eleven flowers in my stamp set. Now that I've done what's likely to be the most challenging sets, I'm excited about the possibilities that this opens up.

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