Transcripts
1. Quick Start Card Making Course Trailor: The image. If the function is okay.
2. Quick Start Card Making Downloading and Importing SVG to Design Space: Hi everyone and welcome to
this quickstart tutorial. I'm your host, Janet Shannon. And today I am going to show you a QuickStart tutorial
on card making. So let's jump right in. So the first thing
you'll want to do is go to the ETA Collective dot-dot-dot Shannon.com and
type in the password Jens, a tele AA in all
capital letters. Once you're on the
website, you'll want to scroll down and find the file that says
quick start card making. You can also search for it here in case it's not near the top, you'll select this one. And then if you click on it, it will take you over to Dropbox where you can then
download the SVG file. So if you go over here,
there's an arrow with a down arrow towards
a straight line. You'll click that to download. And you can either save that as a direct download or save
to your own Dropbox. I'm going to do it as
a direct download. And if I go down here
and you show in Finder, if you're on a Mac, you'll find it right here
in your Downloads. Now it is a zip file, so you will need to
unzip it in order to use it in crickets
design space. So go ahead and double-click
it and put it somewhere on your computer that's
easily accessible. I like to use my desktop, so I'm just going
to drag and drop that over to my desktop. The next step is to go ahead and open cricket design space. If you haven't already
downloaded design space, you'll need to go to design
space dot cricket.com, and download their software. Once you've opened the software, you'll need to register, as well as register any
equipment that you've purchased, whether it's a cricket maker or an iron or their cricket joy. And then you'll want to
calibrate your machine. If you go to the upper
left sandwich menu, once you've registered, you'll
see your information here. Home Canvas, new machine
setup and calibration. Again, make sure that you do your new machine setup and do the calibration to
make sure that all of your cuts come out exactly
the way you want them to.
3. Uploading to Design Space: The first thing you're
gonna do is go to New Project and then upload, then select, Upload image, browse, and find it
on your computer. It's called birthday
present Quickstart, SVG. So I'm going to
double-click and you'll get this screen here that says
name and tag pattern. You can name this
whatever you'd like and add whatever
tags you'd like. And then when you're
finished, click Save. From there, go ahead and
select what you've just uploaded and click
insert images. And as you can see,
it's put it here on your Canvas and design space.
4. Resizing and Preparing the SVG for Cutting: If you look over to the right, you'll see that all
four layers are a darker gray tone than
the rest of the palate, meaning that all of those
layers are selected. If you look just above that, you'll see an ungroup icon. You'll go ahead and select
that to ungroup everything. Then what you'll do is
drag and hold across the two larger parts of the SVG file that formed
the box and the bow. And you'll go over here to
align and do align bottom, and then go to a line again
and center horizontally. Then you'll click the box that is completely
filled in here at the top and drag it down to the bottom so that it
will be the bottom layer. And now you can see what
the layers will look like. Then drag and drop this gray one over the
top of the white one. They don't need to be perfect. And then drag and hold to
select both of those circles. And put that anywhere
inside the square, the square of the box itself. From there, you'll drag and
hold to select everything. And now we're going to size the card the way
that we want it. Now I know this isn't
a perfect square, but generally I go for
five-by-five cards. If I'm doing a square, make this five inches
wide at its widest, I should get something
around seven inches tall for about a
five by seven card. So I'm going to come
up here to size. And I'm going to delete what's
there and type in five. And as long as this lock
is showing is locked, if I hit tab, it will automatically size everything else in
that selection. And as you can see, it's
just under seven inches.
5. Create Writeable Space on Back and Prep Cricut: There's one last trick
that you can do if you want to have a writable
space on the back, but it not be a fold open card. Go to Shapes square. And then you'll simply size
this over your background to the size that you
want, if you'd like, so that it is closer to
what the size of the boxes, since the box is not
a perfect square, you can unlock it
here and then adjust it to fit well in
the center there. And then again drag and
hold to select both layers. Do align center horizontally. And now this will cut a
separate piece of paper to go on the back of
the card that you can write your sentiment on or any letter that you may want to put to whoever you're
giving this to. So I'm going to go ahead and turn on these other layers here. One thing I do want
to point out too is that if you have
a piece of paper, Let's say this is white and you want to cut this out
on white card stock. You want these to cut at
the same time so that you're saving paper and making sure that you're
efficient with your time. So if you wanted to cut
these on the same Matt, you would select
this square right here and then come up
here to line type cut, and select the same color
as the color that this is. And now they'll cut
on the same mat. And what I mean by that
is if I go to make it, See, if I come down here, they're both put
on the same Matt. Whereas if they were separate
colors, they wouldn't be. But I know that I don't want that to cut in the same color. I'm going to cut
this out on white. Now. I will probably
want this on white to, or some sort of
light background. So I could make this
the same colors. This if I wanted to, but I'm going to leave it
the way that it is for now. So go ahead and turn
on your cricket. If you're using an explorer Er2, you'll have a dial on the right side of
your cricket where you can select the type of material that you're
working with. I always recommend
leaving this on custom so that you
don't accidentally forget to change it to
card stock when you're going in between
different materials. So when you're in
your design space and you're about to send
this over to your cricket. You'll go up here to the green
button that says Make it. And Cricket Design space decides what order it's
going to cut it in. So you can see that layout here. Click Continue. And it will connect
to your machine. I connect mine via Bluetooth. You may have yours
via USB cable. Either way, make
sure it's connected. Now if you're new to cricket, you may not have these options under your set based material. Also, if you're using an explorer Er2 and you don't have your
dial set to custom, you won't see this here. So I recommend
setting it to custom. And again, if you're on a maker, you may not have anything here. I like to use card stock for intricate cuts for this
particular type of card stock. If you don't have this option
under set-based material, go to Browse all materials
and type in card. And here you'll see card
stock for intricate cuts. Go ahead and select,
it, will click Done. And because I like to make
sure everything is cut out nice and clean
under pressure. I change it to more. And then under load
tools and materials, it will tell you what
you need to load here is telling me I need my fine
point blade in clamp B. So I'm going to make
sure that that's there. Now let's go ahead and
get our mats ready.
6. Preparing Your Mats: For this project, I'm going
to be using Parkland papers, rustic meadows printed
card stock stack. As you can see, it's got
lots of options from solids to different prints,
textures, some foils. So this is just a quick overview
of what that looks like. You can also get an idea for
what's in here on the front. And for this project, I've
selected this gold foil, this floral, which
has gold foil on it. And for the tags, I've selected this kind of deep aqua and this is a lighter
aqua on the other side. And then for the
sentiment on the back, I will use just this white, which is also patterned on the back, but
you won't see that. So let's go ahead
and load our mats. If you're just starting
out with your cricket, you may only have one
standard grit Matt. I happened to have a
small collection of them that I reuse
over and over again. Of course they lose
their stickiness over time and that's okay. What I like to do is
keep some masking tape handy and use this
to tape my paper down onto the cricket matt so that they don't lift
while it's cutting. So I'm going to load each paper
on as many masses I have. That way I can be
feeding them one after another into my cricket. So cricket design space tells me the first one
that's going to cut is the smaller of the tags. So the small tag
that's going to be on top is going to be
this lighter blue color. So I'm gonna go ahead
and put this here. And then I'm just going
to take a small piece of masking tape. You can get them at
the Dollar Store. And I'm going to
start by putting this right here and
another one at the bottom. Now because this is
such a small cut, I don't need to take the sides. But if you feel more comfortable doing that and you
have an older map, that's definitely something
that is okay to do. And then it says
For my next cut, it's going to cut the back area of the card that we're
going to be writing on. So I'm going to put
the white one here. And I just press it down firmly. And I'll take another piece of masking tape and put that
at the top and bottom. And then it tells me the
next one is going to cut is actually going to be the
second size of the round tag, which is on the
back of the aqua. So I'll have to stop that one, flip it over and then put
that one into the cricket. When the time comes. Then it says it's
going to do the foil. Now if you have paper that
has the circle at the top or yours has a perforation of
sorts across the top here. Just make sure you put it above this white
line right there so that you don't actually
include that in your design. I've done that before. And it is not cute. Now because this design is a
little bit more intricate, I'm going to make sure
I take the sides, but I am going to
tape it a little bit lower down so that
there's no chance of ending up cutting through the masking tape because
it's such a precise tool, even if it does cut
through the masking tape. The masking tape usually
adds an extra layer of thickness that it won't end up cutting all the way
through the paper. So I do feel like it might end up actually
hitting this one. So I'm just going to move this
down a little bit further. And I'll just take
off the end here. And then the last one is
going to be our floral layer. Now you'll need to decide
which way you want the florals to be
going on the gift box. You can do it any
which way you'd like. If you do do it this way, just make sure that this is on the mat or else
if it's hanging off, it won't fit into your cricket. But I like it the way that
it is up and down like this. And just go ahead and tape. There we go. Now we're ready
to take this to the cricket.
7. Cutting Your Material: So now that we're ready
to put it in the cricket, you'll want to make
sure that you have the proper blade loaded. In this case, it's
the fine point laid for the material
that I'm using. And to load the
cricket, you'll want to make sure that your
mat is in-between both of these
plastic holders here and push it back and tell
it won't go any further. Then if you have this blinking arrow
underneath your power button, go ahead and press it.
And you're cricket. We'll go ahead and pull
it into the machine. You'll know it's ready when the cricket symbol
starts to blink. And then it'll start, it's
cut once you press it. And then to unload your mat, you'll see this blinking
arrow. Go ahead and press it. And it will go ahead and feed your mat out
of the machine. And now we're ready to
load our next Matt. In this case, it's going
to be the white area that we can write on on
the back of the card. So again, making
sure it's between these two plastic
holders aren't here. Press it until it
doesn't go any further. Then press the
blinking arrow button. And once that cricket logo
on there starts to blink, you can go ahead and press it and it will start its next cut. And then remove that mat by pressing the blinking
arrow button. Do this for all of your mats until your project
is finished cutting. So now we've got all of our
pieces to our card cut out. I'm going to show you
how to take these off of your mats without
curling your paper. Now, because I have mats that are well loved for
lack of a better word, they come off pretty easy. But if you have a brand new mat, sometimes what you'll
find is you want to just peel the paper
off like anything else. But if you were to do that, you would curl your paper in. It could be unusable after that. So the easiest way
to do it is to take your mat and flip
it over like this. And then curl your mat
backwards like this. And just let the paper come
off of the mat by itself. Now, if you need
some help with this, because your mat is really, really sticky and maybe you've
got an intricate design. You can use one of crickets bachelor's to help get it off. So there's our, the back of
our card, as you can see. And I'm just going to set
this off to the side. And we'll do the same
with each of these. Now sometimes you might
find that a piece has not cut quite as well
as you had hoped. So you can usually just hold
the paper and pull it and it'll tear off like a
perforated piece of paper. All right, so now we've
got all the pieces to our card cut out and
we're ready to assemble. Now I'll to give
you an idea of what this will look
like on the front. If you overlay these like this, that is what the gift
box will look like. And then we have the gift tag
that will go right there. And then of course on the back, we will put this on there so
that we can write a message. So let me show you
how to assemble this. And you will have made
your first conquered.
8. Assembling the card and all done: To put this card together, I like to use my Elmore's craft bond multipurpose
spray adhesive. Now this cam that I have has
lasted me quite a while. So it may not look quite
like this at the store, but Elmer's does
have a variety of different spray adhesives that work really well
for card making. So I'll be using this and make sure to give
it a good shake. Also just a
disclaimer is usually a better idea to do this outside where there's good ventilation. But for the purposes
of this tutorial, I will be doing this
indoors in my art studio. And I like to use
just a box that I got for whatever
delivery I may have had. Usually it's Amazon so
that I can spray into the box and the walls
catch the over spray. So to start off, we know that we're
not going to be spring anything onto this. So I can go ahead and put
this off to the side. This will be going
on the gold side up, so we're going to
spray the back. I'm going to leave it down here. And then we're going to be using this on the other
side of the card. So we're going to turn it
over and spray this side. And then lastly for these tags, I'm going to be spring this side so that it sticks
onto here like this. So I'm going to turn this
over and spray like this. I like to put all of
my pieces in the box because as I'm
spraying one piece, the over spray tends
to go this way. And if I go to then put another
piece down here to spray, it's usually wet and
sticky from before. So the side that I don't want sticky ends up getting
glue all over it. So I don't like to
do it that way. I like to put them all in there and then spray one at a time. So make sure you
give it a good shake and we will apply a generous
amount on the back. So I'm just going
to pick this up carefully and move the box. And here I usually like to
line up the bottoms first, but because I know I have a perfectly cut hole that
I can line it up with. I'm actually going to
line it up that way. You do have a little
bit of workability with this before it's completely dry. And then I like to work
from the inside out as I'm pushing it down that way, any extras will work their way out instead of ending
up getting increased. And now you can see you've got this nice gold frame
to our gift package. So now we're gonna go ahead and spray the piece that
goes on the back. And then we go for
the back piece. And then last we're
going to spray the tag. And again for this, I'm going to line up the holes in
the center at the top. And if I get it to where it's not quite lined up
the way that I want. I can work it around
just a little bit. My fingers tend to get very
sticky in this process. Now if you do get adhesive
on here like this, you can usually just kinda
scrape it off with fingernail. There we go. And now we can go ahead and finish
assembling the card. And now the last thing I'm
gonna do is use a Brad to connect the tag to
the actual gift box. So I'm going to line up these
holes here in the center, push that through, and then
place the finger over it, and then turn the
card to the side. And we're just going to open these little
butterflies here. And now you have
your tag adhered. It can move free form. And you can write
Happy birthday or whatever sentiment
you want on there and then your note on the back. I hope you enjoyed
this tutorial and I can't wait to see
what to make with it. Be sure to follow
me on Instagram at Jensen-Shannon
creative atelier in, I will see you in another
course very soon. Bye.
Jen Shannon
