Grouping with the Gypsy

I spent some "quality time" with the Gypsy today and had a lot of fun figuring out how to make some new designs that take advantage of the "grouping" feature offered by the Gypsy.  This will be a huge timesaver in designing but there is a catch - right now the previewing and cutting of the complex designs is extremely slow.  I wonder if some people have been assuming that the machine is frozen and have given up because of the length of time needed to preview the welds and cut these designs.  Remember, patience is a virtue!

Most Design Studio users have been wishing for a true "grouping" feature ever since the Design Studio software came out.  I have been able to make many designs that are "adjustable" by using the nudge arrows to move items into position while keeping them all in the same selection box, but this is a slow and tedious process.  It is also impossible to change the angle, stretch or skew and individual element within the selection box.

I made a sort of snowflake design using an element from the Gypsy Wanderings cartridge (one of the two exclusive cartridges preloaded on the Gypsy).

This screen shot shows the keypad position of the element that I used - I think it is a clock hand or pointer of some sort.  I took a screen shot of the actual element since the keypad icon is so small!

I made a pair of hands by overlapping two images and aligning the holes.

 

Once I did this, I grouped the two together by selecting first one hand, touching the "group" icon (it turns yellow) and then selecting the second hand and touching the "group" icon again.  Once the items were joined into a group there was a light grey box surrounding them.

I then used the "duplicate" button on the Advanced tab to create additional grouped sets of hands.  The "duplicate" button is to the right of the preview eyeball and looks like two overlapping squares.

 

I made eight pairs of hands and arranged them by turning them at a rotation of 22.5 degrees and aligning the center hole.  I wanted a solid center so I added a circle that I sized to fit on top of the hole.

When I had the elements arranged, I grouped all of the items and touched the weld button.  Since they were grouped, I only had to touch the button once.

When I previewed the design, I was not happy to see that, except for the center cutouts in the tips of the hands, the lines were pale gray which means they would not cut.  Obviously, this was not working so I thought about how I might be able to "fix" it.  In Design Studio, the order in which items are added to the design is sometimes significant, so I decided to have another try.

I selected the entire image and clicked the "ungroup" button.  Then I started with the center circle, touched it to turn it blue and then touched the "group" button and methodically added the hands by tapping each of them in order around the circle.  When they were all selected (turned blue) I touched the "group" button once more.  When the entire group was selected the items were blue - when I tapped off the design, they were red, indicating that weld had been selected for all of the items.

I tapped the eyeball to preview and watched the little hour glass for a very long time.....probably 8 - 10 minutes.  Finally, the preview was built and there was a red cutting outline indicating that everything was welded together properly - Eureka!

I took the Gypsy to my Cricut and pressed the "cut" icon (blade) on the Basic tab. One by one the pieces of the design turned pale gray - I believe this indicates that they are being read for cutting. This took a long time again but finally the screen moved to the "cut screen" so I loaded the mat and tapped the blade to start the cut.  The Gypsy sat and "thought" for a long time again and then - cut the design!

But now for the really exciting part!  I could have easily made this design or a similar one in Design Studio up to this point.  The magic of the Gypsy is that I was now able to select the grouped design, duplicate it by tapping the duplicate button and then resize the design all at once!  I did a "save as" of the file and made a new file with five inch snowflakes - quick and simple. 

When you remove the cut from the mat, a wide plastic putty knife is a great help.  I was able to lift the design , leaving the small center bits from the tips on the mat.

I saved the teardrop cutouts and interspersed them with the tips to make this design - if you want to do this be sure to take care in lifting the pieces.

The outer offcut is also attractive and could be used in a project - I always like the positive/negative effect!

I hope the explanation I gave about how I did this is helpful to new Gypsy owners.  If you like this design and don't have a Gypsy you can do something similar but it won't be resizable due to the angles of rotation required.  This LINK will take you to an old post where I made snowflakes using elements from Fabulous Finds. 

I will still try to get a video made but I am not happy with the screen resolution with the Flip and when I use my larger video camera I get a nice recording but I have trouble with the video format for editing and uploading to YouTube - I'll keep trying!

Fabulous Finds Snowflakes

It seems like the wrong season but believe it or not we have snow predicted for Friday morning! These snowflakes are some more of the things I designed while exploring my Fabulous Finds cartridge for some different ways to use it.

Here are close up photos of each snowflake - the solid flowers



The open flowers



the solid hearts



and the open hearts



These are very simple - just eight repeats of some of the tab designs positioned at equal angles around the center (overlapping the center holes as closely as possible). Six pieces would make a more accurate snowflake but I liked the look with eight better - a bit of poetic license calling them snowflakes!

Each snowflake has an extra cut circle centered on top of all the small circle cuts to make the final result symmetrical as you can see in this photo of the new circle and the overcuts of the small circles.



These are easiest to design from the center of the 12 x 12 mat but remember you can cut a smaller piece of paper and place it in the proper position as shown below - it should be about 6 1/2 by 6 1/2 inches and placed in the center of the mat as you can see here (no need to waste an entire sheet of 12 x 12 paper).



I used 3 inch tabs for these so they are just a bit big for the baby bug but you can easily duplicate this pattern with slightly smaller elements on the baby bug mat.

It is fun to layer the various snowflakes together and see how the designs change - here are some examples.







In this final example I actually "wove"them together by pulling every other flower through to the top above the hearts.



I think I may try cutting these in different colors and then layering to see how that looks! What variations will you come up with - I'd love to see them via comments or a post to the Cricut Message Board.

Fabulous Finds Snowflakes

Fabulous Finds Doily (or frame!)

So many frames lately - so I went back in my files and found this doily that I did a while ago but had not posted . (I actually haven't posted everything I've done - some are too simple, some are too personal and wouldn't be useful to others, and some are just waiting for a little something to make them "post-worthy").

I got the Fabulous Finds cartridge for a great sale price shortly after I got my Expression but I hadn't really used it - wasn't even sure what all those things could be used for! I looked at some of the interesting shapes and liked the hearts (I think I started this around Valentine's Day) so I started flipping and rotating them and this is what I came up with.

The offcut has an interesting shape - I think this could be used for a layout - it's in my "save" pile. I think it looks like some sort of flower...



I set this file up on two mats and the second mat has the cut to turn it into (surprise!) a frame!

Here is the doily on the mat after cutting



Here you can see it with the center circle removed and sitting beside it



Finally - here is the open doily or frame



It is a bit fiddly getting all the small pieces out but just be patient - if you have trouble with the cutting it may be time to replace your blade. I hope you like this one and can find a place to use it. Take a careful look at this cartridge, there are a lot of intriguing possibilities beyond the hinges, tags and fasteners.

Fabulous Finds Doily