Craft Edge

As some people have seen over on the "Bugs" board, I've been trying to figure out how to cut plain-old straight lines with SCAL. Well, I finally made it work and here is the result.

This is a simple snowflake pattern that is fun to build with your kids. We've made tons of them this Christmas season (first manually, and now using the Cricut to cut the pattern).



The pattern and assembly instructions can be seen here:http://www.theathertons.info/2008/12/th ... e-pattern/

(Post updated to point to new blog address)

Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.
Thanks so much for sharing the pattern plus instructions. I am going to have 5 nieces and nephews here for Christmas through to New Year so I think this will be on the list of things for them to do to keep them quiet (that is if the weather is not nice and we can't send them to the beach all day every day which will be my first choice )
Raewyn

These really are beautiful! I tried downloading the .scut file and all I got was program jibberish. I note that you said it would be the easier file to use. Could you please check on that link for us? TIA! Merry Christmas!

suziscrapper wrote:These really are beautiful! I tried downloading the .scut file and all I got was program jibberish. I note that you said it would be the easier file to use. Could you please check on that link for us? TIA! Merry Christmas!

I think the issue is that .scut files are actually XML files internally. Depending on your browser, it might try to interpret or display the file instead of downloading it. It think if you right click on the file and choose "Save link as..." you can download the file. In my browser, when the XML code is displayed on the screen, I can also choose to save the text to a file that works in SCAL as well.

The root of the problem probably has something to do with MIME types... Just to make sure everyone can get the file, I've attached it here:

The directions mention cutting the squares on a 12x12 piece of paper. I don't have the Expressions. Can these somehow be done on the regular Cricut? Would they be too small if they were cut on a 6" mat?

kaesmom wrote:The directions mention cutting the squares on a 12x12 piece of paper. I don't have the Expressions. Can these somehow be done on the regular Cricut? Would they be too small if they were cut on a 6" mat?

I don't have a small Cricut to work with, so I can't confirm all of the details. Here is a version of the pattern that cuts 2 squares on a 6x12 mat.
Here's how I *think* you should size the pattern to work on a 6x12 mat:

Scale and position the pattern so that the edges of the square cuts are 3/4" away from the edge of the mat, all the way around (except for the line that is cut to divide the two squares, which should extend to about 1/2" from each edge.)

Make sure that both ends of the line that divides the two squares is entirely inside the cutting area of the mat. If it is not, SCAL will not cut it, and you will have to measure and cut the line yourself afterwards. You can check to see if SCAL will cut the line by using the preview function. If it doesn't show up, try shrinking the design slightly.

I hope this works. Let me know if you try it!

So can you fill me in on how you figured out how to have simple lines?? Every time I try something like that it wants to have a 'closed' path. If I don't close the path the preview in SCAL shows those radical lines.

I'm hoping I'll soon be able to do the dashed score lines for tearing off or folding along.

Any insight would be appreciated!

Thanks a lot for sharing this. Its beautiful and must've been a ton of work!

Very pretty! TFS!!

Marly wrote:So can you fill me in on how you figured out how to have simple lines?? Every time I try something like that it wants to have a 'closed' path. If I don't close the path the preview in SCAL shows those radical lines.

I'm hoping I'll soon be able to do the dashed score lines for tearing off or folding along.

Any insight would be appreciated!

So the short answer is that you can't currently make SCAL work with unclosed paths. The long answer is that there are some workarounds, but I guess scoring might be possible, if sort of kludgy.

The original discussion that I was part of is here: http://forums.surecutsalot.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2789

It does seem to be very important to use the techniques described, because just drawing very narrow boxes doesn't work consistently either.