Atherton Family Notes

Sandi and I decided to buy a Cricut machine a few weeks ago. If you’ve never seen a device like it before, they are pretty amazing. You load paper or thin plastic or vinyl into the machine, and use it to cut designs.  The “Expression” model that we bought can load sheets up to 12″ x 24″.

There are several competitive machines available on the market such as ones designed by Pazzles or the Craft Robo, but we settled on this one for a couple of reasons:

1. It was less expensive (on sale) than the competing options.
2. The supplies (knives, mats, etc.) are available locally.
3. With a third-party software called Sure-Cuts-A-Lot, it can cut nearly any shape or font without having to buy lots of cartridges.  Although, we still have the option to do so — some of the cartridges look very useful.

Anyway, it’s tons of fun to play with, and we’ve started making lots of projects with it already, including the latest scrapbook pages by the girls. Expect to see a lot of the results in the future.

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Yesterday, I posted our 2008 Christmas card, and I decided to share the pattern, just in case anyone is interested.  It’s a fairly simple design and easy to use in most cutting programs, such as Sure-Cuts-A-Lot for the Cricut Expression.  If you scale the image to fit exactly the size of the cuttable area of a 12×12 mat, the pattern will yield a card the same size as the one we sent.

A close-up of the card front:

A close-up of the card back:

Here’s how the card looks folded up and ready to mail in a 4×5 envelope:

Enjoy!  You can download the pattern here.

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Here’s a scrapbook page I made using last year’s Christmas pictures of Carissa, Cece and Sadie.  I was inspired by a random piece of abstract art I saw at Deviant Art (which, incidentally, is a great place to hang around if you need inspiration.)

I made the page by cutting out strips of paper with the Cricut and then pasting them onto a plain black background.  It’s hard to tell from the scan, but the green strips are attached with thick glue dots, given the whole page a slightly 3D effect.

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Yesterday, I posted my “Christmas 2007″ scrapbook page, and today, I’m sharing the pattern for any interested Cricut/Sure-Cuts-A-Lot users.  This pattern is much easier to do on the Cricut Expression, but it can probably be adapted for the smaller format devices if desired.

Here is the what I intended the pattern to look like:

If you compare it to the final assembled version, you’ll notice that I ended up placing the strips a little closer together.  To make up for that, I added a white strip of “snow” to the bottom of the page.

Also, if you plan to make this page, be aware that the pattern does not include the blue strip at the very top, either.  This is because you can’t cut a 12″ x 1″ strip very easily on the Expression (at least, not without wasting a lot of paper).  I cut this strip by hand and added it separately.

Here are the files you need to cut this pattern:

• blue.svg  Once you import it into Sure-Cuts-A-lot, set the size to 10.5″ x 10.1″ to cut the strips at full size.
• brown.svg  Set the size to 1.6″ x 1.55.”
• green.svg  For some reason I don’t fully understand, this file retained the 12″ x 12″ outline of the original page, so set the size to 12″ x 12″ and align it so that it cuts inside the safe area of the mat.
• green2.svg  Set this one to 12″ x 12″ also.
• yellow.svg Set this one to 1.6″ by 1.6″ to make it the size that appears in the composite pattern above.  Alternately, you can use one of the built-in shapes from Sure-Cuts-A-Lot to get the same effect, which is what I did ultimately.

I used very simple, primary colors for this page, but I think that it would also look really good if cut using certain patterned papers.  If you decide to make this yourself, I’d love to see the results!

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Note:  If you find this pattern interesting, I recommend that you buy the book Kirigami by Jeffrey Rutzky from Barnes and Noble.  It’s our original source for this project and an excellent introduction to an interesting craft that is tons of fun to do as a family.

I’ve taken the 3D kirigami snowflake pattern that we’ve talked about a few times on our blog, and I’ve created a pattern that can be used in a Cricut expression to make the cuts needed for the pattern out of 12×12 sheets of scrapbook paper. Below, I’ve posted the pattern so that you can make the snowflakes yourself if you have a Cricut Expression and Sure-Cuts-A-Lot.
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