Alphabet Swap

I participated in an alphabet swap on the Cricut Message Board Design Studio Forum. We were to design a new alphabet in upper and lower cases and numbers too. These are the alphabets I created.

These are done using Accent Essentials and Plantin Schoolbook. The letter files contain multiple mats to keep all of the cuts on the top of the mat so if you have an original cricut you can use these if you own the cartridges.



While the designs are welded to the letters for cutting individually, you would need to copy and past and shift the components to create any welded words (I keep hoping for an update that will allow grouping of welded elements so they can be moved as a unit).

If you want only certain letters and do not want to waste time and/or paper, you should open a new page of the file and copy and paste the letter and the flourish so that only the letters you wish to cut are on that mat. If the letters you want happen to fall in the same position on the new mat, you can either open yet another page or carefully shift the two pieces to a new location and make sure that they are touching in the same way as the originals (or you can improve upon my beginning and adapt as you please).



I was going for an elegant, fairy tale look with these. For the upper case I kept the flourishes on the left side and for the numbers I kept the flourishes on the right side but for the lower case the flourishes changed in size and location until I liked the way they looked!

Many variations are possible so feel free to take this as a starting point and adapt to your purposes!

Flourish Alphabet - Upper Case

Flourish Alphabet - lower case

Flourish Numbers

Recipe Swap Layouts (with files)

I recently participated in a recipe swap on the Cricut message board - I signed up for two groups which meant I had to make 15 each of two layouts . We had to use at least one Cricut element for our layouts and there was a contest for the most elements used on a single layout. I did my designs using the Design Studio software and making only one cut (composed of many elements) for each recipe. The swaps have been received by all participants now so I can "reveal" my designs and share my .cut files.

I did the actual recipes using my Creative Memories digital scrapbooking software - StoryBook Creator Plus (I highly recommend this program and you can contact me if you do not have a CM consultant and would like more information about it).

The first recipe I chose was my mother's Gingersnap recipe. She was "famous" for these Gingersnaps and probably made tens of thousands of them in her lifetime. We would give them out for Halloween treats (back when you could do that!) and parents would raid the trick or treat bags for the cookies! I have so many memories of rolling the dough into balls and then in sugar and I have continued the tradition of making gingersnaps with my sons. This is truly a family favorite.

I used a background of CM digital paper with a nice shade of blue and polkadots and add the recipe in a text box that I floated on a white square. I changed the opacity of the square to make it more like vellum, added a blur to the edges and then at the four corners I added digital "stickers" of three gingersnaps for a photo corner effect. The "stickers" are made from actual photos I took of gingersnaps that I made with my son. I then copied, rotated and "grouped" together the individual gingersnap stickers.

My Mom collected china and glass (lots of it!) and one type of serving plate she had was glass and had an open circle design at the edges. I designed the "frame" for the recipe with this plate in mind. To make it "pop," I used the Cricut markers to outline the design - I used brown to coordinate with the cookie color! It took quite a while to do 16 of these (always make an extra one...) but I got into the rhythm of cut, ink, ink, cut, and had two mats going all the time. I used Plantin Schoolbook and Stretch Your Imagination for the frame design.

The second recipe I chose was one that my husband''s mother gave me many years ago for a quicker sort of apple pie - no crust! Apples are a big favorite in our family since my father in law grew up on an apple farm, and we all eat a lot of apples.

For this recipe I decided to make a circular "frame" around the recipe using a ring of apples. I wanted it to fill the page as much as possible and discovered that I needed to have the apples move up and down in the ring to fill the space in the most attractive way. The apples at the four compass points are "shorter" than the apples in the diagonal corners. I liked the font I chose for the title - I thought it had a "Swedish" sort of Arts and Crafts look. The font is called "Chelsea Studio." I used George and Makin the Grade for the apple ring design. There is a second mat with 16 apples that can be cut to overlay the ring - I liked it better without the contrasting apples for this project so I did not use them.

Here are all my completed layouts on my kitchen table before I shipped them off for the exchange.

Here are all of the recipes I received set out on the same table - I think they look like a quilt!

Here are the two files I created for this swap

Gingersnap Frame of Circles

Ring of Apples