Monday Morning

Notes on Paper Crafts

Monday, December 8, 2008

SCREEN PRINT ...

worked, for the first time in all these years. With a picture I liked, in gmail, I pressed the PrintScreen key, on the top row next to Scroll Lock. Then I minimized e-mail (really G-mail) and opened a new file in Word. and clicked on Edit/Paste. Then I printed the desired graphic. This proves that Screen Print puts whatever you point it at on the Clip Board just as if you had clicked Edit/Copy or Control C. Therefore, you have a lot of stuff on your clip board until you clear it out. The fast way to clear it is to select one letter wherever you are, then click Edit Copy or Contol C. That way your clip board will have just that one letter using up hard drive space, and whenever you want to copy/paste something else, the letter will disappear.

Comment from reader ... "And, truly neat if you use FireFox, take a look at ScreenGrab! It's free, and it lets you copy or save just a selected area from a web page. And gmail, unlike Eudora, is on a web page so ScreenGrab! saves a lot of clicks and editing." - L

SWAPS ...

In a Yahoo! group called Creative Swappers, an offshoot of Pals and More, I have volunteered to manage the swaps, In January I plan to list a swap using foil, another making a small booklet, another using paper piecing. The graphic I just copied is a good example of paper piecing. As always, if you have a question, ask Google. Just type paper piecing, or Using Foil, or tiny book. If you would like email copies of my files for a tiny book of 20 pages or so made from folding and cutting one piece of paper, e- mail me.

We are just closing 12 swaps. including Christmas cards, ornaments, strips to glue into ring chains, stand up houses for a Christmas village, holiday place cards, address labels for boxes, and digital cards, cards made combining elements from kits and graphics, no cutting and pasting allowed. For ornaments people printed two copies of a graphic, decorated them with glitter and paint and glued them back to back with a layer or two of cardstock, and a ribbon hanger loop glued in beteen.

For those of us with very small trees, these light weight ornaments are fine. If they come with a friend's name on them, they are still finer. Our first Christmas was a WWII one. There were no glass ornaments in the stores. Our first tree had paper toy elephants and a light wooden horse and popcorn strings, as well as a very few glass ornaments that had survived from our parents' trees.

CRICUT ...

Cricut is a die cutter that cuts out letters or shapes. It does not need to be connected to a printer, It does need a power supply, paper cut to 6 x 12", a cutting mat, a sharp tool like a special spatula or a paper piercer to lift the letters off the mat after they are cut, and MOST OF ALL it needs a cartridge, Each cartridge costs about $85 list or around $33 on e-bay. Each cartridge has a booklet showing all the designs it will cut, and a 2 inch high device that plugs into the Cricut base. The directions for set up are frustrating, so choose a pleasant morning to start.

Each cartridge prints two things for each key, upper and lower case letters, or a letter and a flower, or two flower designs. In addition there are keys for shadow, outline, etc.,different for each cartridge. In Animal World, if you hit the DOG key, a special key will print BARK. You can change the size of letters from 1 to 5 inches. You can change the cutting depth to work with different papers, or buy another blade to cut even deeper into vinyl or maybe even chip board or grunge board. I am doing vinyl with the extra blade, to make outdoor signs, and so far this project is going well. The vinyl is self adhesive with a backing, and my sample letters have been out in rain, Nebraska sun, and snow, looking like new.

A software program called Surecutsalot promises to connect the Cricut to a computer and cut out what you type on the computer keyboard. I have installed the software and connected it but have not tried to run it. What I learned today is that the Cricut keyboard will not make the Cricut cut when the computer is connected.

The most fascinating thing to me about Cricut is watching it cut a whole phrase in one piece, such as Happy Birthday, Thinking of you, It's your day. Really ingenious design. I find that the phrase alone, cut out of contrasting paper, makes a good looking card message area without any graphics. If you keep a few cutout phrases handy you can whip out emergency cards fast.

There is a larger cutter called Expression, which does all the same things, but cuts on 12" paper. I haven't begun to try everything Cricut can do so I feel no need for a bigger machine.

DIES AND DIE CUTS AND DIE CUTTERS...

I would have saved some money if someone had made this clear to me long ago. A DIE CUT is the letter or dog or swirl that you have cut out on one cutter or another. People sell packs of die cuts on e-bay, and you can too if you have a die cutter.

A DIE is the sharp edged shaped blade that does the cutting. On the Sissyx the die is concealed in black sponge in a plastic frame. For Quikutz the die is a silver metal square. For Cricut a tiny blade in a vertical holder does the cutting , and the cartridge tells the blade where to go. It may run around the paper looking for an area that has not been cut. There are arrows to press to move the blade to where you want to cut, if you don't agree with the cartridge's choice. Note that on Sissyz and Quickutz you buy a different die for each shape, in one size. With cricut you pay a lot more for a cartridge than for a die, but you get maybe 40 shapes in 5 different sizes, with varied effects for each one, in any one cartridge. Then there are the roller cutters, the Wizard and others. For these you make a sandwich of plastic boards with your paper and a die in the middle and the pressure of rollers on the sandwich cuts the paper. This machine works like the clothes wringer of my youth.

The DIE CUTTER is the machine that uses the die to produce the die cut. There is a lot of advertising about one die cutter using the dies made for another. I have not made any of this work yet. If you have, please e-mail me and share specifics as to the machine you cut with , the die that works, and the machine the die was bought for.

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