First of 3…From Stephen

This is Stephen fathers day card, that I designed for him on the Cricut gypsy (my first project). I have been very sceptical of its use in the past, but the more I play with it now, the more I am understanding its benefits. a bit of an extravagance considering the free Cricut Craft Room software is due for public release soon, but with my internet connection I probably will end up very frustrated at not being able to design anything.

I was particularly impressed with the text. It was cut on the cricut out of white shrink plastic (at round about 5 inches or so), coloured with very pale promarkers, then shrunk. I though Stephen would enjoy watching it twist and turn then right itself – but he has been in such an awkward mood all day I ended up finishing it myself!!!
You can see in this photo the original cut size of the greeting…

The advantage of the gypsy is that you can size up each cut layer of the card against the next (as transparencies) to ensure that the sizes and proportions of the characters are correct. This is something that can be tricky when you are trying to put all the elements together straight from your head to the cutting mat. It really comes into its own when you are using more than one cartridge, and also characters that are not prelayered and set out in the booklets for you.
In this example the Lion (in the cartrdige booklet) is not related to the blue frame it sits on or the front green frame. With the gypsy I was able to size the Lion to fit both.

I hope that is clear, over coming projects I hope I can demonstrate what I mean with other images. Perhaps a look at the photo of the gypsy screen you can see how the card was mapped out.