Welding a Word Using Paint Shop Pro

I've made this screen-shot tutorial to show how I weld letters into words for cutting on the Craft Robo.  Presumably this will also work for the Silhouette machine too.

I use Paint Shop Pro to do all my graphics "stuff" and these pictures show the various screens for using PSP - I'm hoping that the processes will be similar for other programs (such as Photoshop) or at least give you some idea as to what to look for in the program you are using.

Once you get the idea, it's really easy to make "joined up" words and of course, you have your whol font folder at your disposal.

Please let me know if you find this useful - click on each picture for a larger view I've used lots of pictures so that you can see all the steps.

1.  Open Paint Shop Pro and Select a new page,  type in the dimensions you wish it to be.  This will depend on how large a word you want to make.  Remember to set the background as White.  This picture shows the settings I use for a simple, quite small word

2. Click on the Add Text tool and then check out the instructions on the screen-shot below to see what ettings to use in each area

3. Type your chosen word into the box, alter the settings as shown, then click OK

4. Now your word should appear on your page.  You need to merge the background and the "Layer" which has your word on.  You'll find the command in one of the drop-down menus:

5. You need to reduce the colours of your word to 2 - just Black and White, to do this use another of the drop down menus:

6. Now we can move the letters around with the funky Magic Wand tool!  Remember, if you do anything you're not happy with you can always just use the "back" button to undo it and have another try

7. Once you've selected the Magic Wand tool, click on one of the letters - you'll know it's been chosen because a dotted line will appear around it - it looks like ants marching around the shape!

8. Move each letter so that they overlap just a little, just follow the instructions in red on the screen-shot

9. Once you're finished moving things around, you'll probably have loads of white space left on your page, so get rid of it:

10.Now SAVE your word as a gif

11. Save it wherever you keep your Craft Robo templates (I save all the words I make into one area, called Words which is subdivided into; "Words A-F, Words G-N and Words O-Z , if I remember, I add the font name to each one I save.  eg this one should be saved in A-F and be called boy_crazyH)

That's it all ready to cut.

Now open a new page in Craft Rob, select the word you've made and resize to your preference - you can make it bigger or smaller, and you can also make it fatter or taller - and of course now you've made it you've got it to use again and again.

I hope you found this useful, and easy to follow.  If you are interested I can show you how to make a mat for your letters and welded words next time.

Eggstra Eggstra, Read All About It!

It's Lythan's turn this week  to set the challenge for Daring Cardmakers everywhere:

Thanks for all those lovely bird cards last week. In our case we can answer the question - what came first the chicken or the egg? because last week it was the chicken on a card and and this week its the egg! For our Dare is
How Egg-citing!
Easter is on its way. Which, amongst other things means Easter Eggs. So be inspired by egg shapes or chocolate or both! We are very sad this week because it is the last week to feature our wonderful guest designers Asia and Nat. You have been fabulous darlings - thanks so much for the inspiration! And we are also saying adieu - but not goodbye to our gorgeous Sue. She is having to take a leave of absence for a wee while. We will miss you Sue.

I think that yet again there were a few furrowed brows among the team at the beginning of the week - well our dares were never meant to be easy peasy - it's not a challenge if it's too simple, is it?

On Wednesday I still hadn't a clue what to do, but something Lythan said that day set the cogs working and an idea started to form.  Another chance for Mr Robo to do his stuff!

The pun came first I must admit, then I tried to come up with something to illustrate it. It seemed a cute idea to have an expectant mother duck (or is it a goose?) using a baby's pram to push her egg around in.  It also got me out of having to decorate a traditional Easter Egg.  The pram template is one I made ages ago, but I altered it for this card to make the hood look as though it was part way down. The egg is just made using the auto-draw ellipse that's on the Robo front page.  The duck/goose was a free colouring page image and took about 5 minutes to convert for Robo cutting as it was so simple!

 I used:

white and yellow Bazzill

Imaginisce papers

Prima Flowers

Card Candy, Brads, Stickles & Liquid Pearls

Sentiment is pc generated, scalloped circle is a Nesties die, plain circle is Robo cut

One of the fab things about the Robo is that it's a simple task to get several templates to work together even if they start off as very different sized images.  I thought I'd add a quick tutorial on how I married up a set of different templates so that they all cut to the same ratio, hopefully it'll be of help to someone out there!

To do this start by loading all the bits  needed onto the same Robo page.

Next put all the bits of each image together on top of each other - in this case I had all the pram bits together and all the goosey bits together, I left the egg aside while I got the rest right.

The goose was far too small to match up with the pram, by "drawing" a line around it I could drag it out from one of the corners until it was the right size for pushing the pram.

Next change the size of the egg first by eye, then put it into the pram and adjusted if necessary

With all the pieces matching,  move (roughly) into the positions they'll be on the card/project.

Now, Select everything in one outline and use the Position Settings (right click for menu, Position Settings is the last option on the drop down list)) to set the actual size you want - tick the Hold Aspect Ration box to keep width and height correct.

Once that's done you can separate all the bits for cutting in the card or paper you want to use.

Sounds complicated, but it's not really!

If I ever learn how to do screen shots I'll add some in!

Right on to the next thing on the list.

 

Feeling Edgy - and a Robo "How to"

Another sunny start to the day here - but then yesterday started like that too - and then it was a case of sunshine and showers all day long. Fortunately, for once it started the showery bit before I'd put my washing out to dry - unlike one day last week when I ended up wetter than the washing had ever been while trying to rescue it from a torrential downpour.
Oh the joys of a British Summer!

Friday is, as usual, Daring Cardmakers Day and we have a lovely new dare to play with:

This week we have a dare called:
On The Edge

We'd love to see you making use of all sorts of border treatments; scallops, trims, pleats, or anything else which makes the edges of your papers and cards look special. You could use Border Punches, Die Cutters, Lace, Fancy Trims and that's just for starters - let your imagination live right on the edge this week - or maybe even go right over the edge!

If you head over to the DCM BLOG you can see how the Design Team interpreted the challenge and hopefully be inspired to have a go yourself. We'd love as many people as possible to join in - we love to see all the cards you make and its such a wonderful way to share and inspire.

As we'll be celebrating our 16th Wedding Anniversary card at the end of the month I thought I'd use this dare to make a card for hubby. It'll be a change to have it ready ahead of time, instead of doing the last minute panic thing!

I thought I'd add to the edges available to decorate by making a joyfold "card within a card" type thing. I've used a border punch to make the white panel, and my Craft Robo to do the other decorative edges.
I've got "Greetings Card Factory" and "Print Artist" graphics programs on my pc - I don't use them for actually making cards, but they do come in handy for all sorts of stuff - so I've been experimenting using making some Robo templates using GCF.
I used it to make the scalloped edge with the semi circle holes, the joined circles trim for the smaller card on the right side and also the scalloped frame for the pc generated message card.

Supplies: Papers: Doodlebug, Imaginisce, Bazzill red card, Spotty velvet paper, large red button, spotty ribbon (Ribbon Oasis), Anitas gem wheel, Maya Road Rub-ons (Bubbly Funk), Fiskars border punch

The "Hearts" edging trim is another Robo template, I thought I'd tell you how I made it in case you'd like to have a go, I used a preset shape in Paint Shop Pro, but I'm sure there'll be something similar in whatever photo/graphics programme you use.

Here's how to make it:
Use the same heart shape pasted several times, swivvling them round and overlapping them to make a long row.
Go to the Layers menu and click "Merge All"
On the Colours menu, use the "decrease number of colours" to use only 2 colours
Use the Fill tool to fill all the shapes with black
Save as a gif file.
I then use the "Back" button to go back through all the steps until I had the original heart shape remaining, I then copy/pasted a few of the hearts without having them touching each other, decreased the colours as before, filled each heart with black and saved this new version too.
In Craft Robo, open a new page and load both versions, resize them together to the size you need and cut. This way you have the row of joined up hearts, and more hearts of the same size to add on top of some of them for dimension - I used foam pads to add my extra hearts.

Let me know if you have a go with the tutorial - hopefully it makes sense, but it would be nice to know one way or the other!

Thanks for visiting today

Blue......and Green

It's Vanessa's turn to set the challenge for The Daring Cardmakers this week and she's chosen a colour combination theme for her dare.

I remember my Grandma saying "Blue and Green should never be seen" when I was a little girl - I never did understand why that should be because after all the grass is green and the sky is blue (sometimes) and they seem to be happy together, don't they. Or maybe not; because all the hot sunshine we've been having lately has turned the grass in our garden quite brown already!

Anyway, I like blue and green together, they always seem a calm, cooland restful colour combination to me.
Initially I thought I'd look for pale shades of the two colours as a starting point, but then I remembered on of my old Basic Grey paper pads (hang on while I go and check which it is...), "Boxer" - I do like the way the colours and designs go together in this set - lovely for men's cards - so that's what I ended up making.
Nothing complicated for this one, but some fave techniques and elements did find their way in.
I made the mosaic tiles by sticking various of the papers onto card then cutting 2.5 cms squares and using the Zutter Round it All to soften the corners.
For a change I joined the edges of the little tiles to make the design instead of leaving gaps between them.
The faux brads are scraps of paper glued to chipboard - I use whichever Cuttlebug die has the right size circle for the project - in this case it's one of those from the flowers die set. To finish the "brads" I put a blob of Glossy Acents on the top. Perfectly matching brads for all your projects lol!
For the lettering I used Mr Robo. For the word "birthday" I wanted the letters to sit on rounded rectangles so I first loaded each letter individually into a Robo page, then "drew a rounded rectangle around the tallest of the letters to check I'd made it tall enough, then moved it over the widest letter to make sure it was wide enough too. Then its an easy job to copy and paste as many as required.
The actual letters were then cut twice, once in card and the second time in the the patterned paper which this time came from the BG "Periphery" paper pad.

I used Hobo font for both the individual letters and also for the "Wishes" which I expanded the letter size then welded together first in Paint Shop Pro.

We'd love you to join inwith our Blue and Green dare - if you need some inspiration por maybe some convincing as to how great the two colours can look together, pop over to the The Daring Cardmakers Blog to see what the girls have been making this week - and to meet Gail, who is our fab Guest Designer for July.

Thank you to everyone who joined in last week's Post Pals challenge - I've not had a chance to get around and see all the cards because I've been really busy since getting back from our IOM trip - but that's on my "to do" list for the weekend. Just thought it was worth mentioning that the PostPals scheme is always there so just because the DCM challenge is over, doesn't mean that you can't send cards to those poorly kiddies any more.....

Right.
Still need to finish that Wedding card...
And I have something else I need to make by end of play today too.
And its still HOT - very humid today too
Thanks for visiting