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Father’s Day Card SVG Download

Father’s Day is Coming!

My dad loves his tools! Here is a Father’s Day Card I made with a border of tools for him. I have included the free cut file with it, including the sentiment separately in case you want to add it to your own creation.


 

Also, check out my new Father’s Day Card Template too!

Check it out HERE.

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Free Flower SVG

Floral Stencil Cutting File

Okay, so this was just for fun. I really love exploring Inkscape! I was playing around and this is what I came up with. I think I will keep playing around, so look forward to some more files soon!

Free Flower Cutting File
Free SVG file download
Please credit me if you use this in any public projects, and I would love to see any projects it is used in!
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Graduation and Mother’s Day Cards

Cards for every Occasion

Well, I know that these occasions have now passed for most of us, but I thought I would share what I came up with anyhow.

I made a couple different Mother’s Day cards, and a graduation card for my little sister.

I was very happy with how the designs came out, though my color choices for the graduation card could have been improved. Oh well, I keep learning!

First, here is the graduation card and a free download of the svg and studio files:

2014 Graduation Card – Black Rose Font for the Year
Free SVG File Download

Below are the Mother’s Day cards I made. For the first one (purple), I used a floral card from the Silhouette Store and added a simple butterfly to it. The second one I used a frame I found on www.birdscards.com and added the sentiment in Blessed Day font. Here is the Mother’s Day card I made last year on my ecraft.

If you like my cards, be sure to check out the Birthday Cards I have made too!
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Free Duckling SVG file for Spring!

Ducklings

Spring has Sprung! Sadly, that statement doesn’t yet ring true here – but I have high hopes. We have warm weather for the next week (and by warm, I mean above freezing) – so thesnow should melt soon! Perhaps we may start seeing green too.

At any rate, I found this adorable sketch pinned on pinterest with a dead link and no searching on my part has turned up its origins. If anyone knows, let me know! I took the liberty of converting to a cutting file because I simply couldn’t resist.

Here it is in all its wonderful spring like glory:


And, of course, a cute little image for pinterest. Have a great day!

Ducklings
 
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Experimenting with my new Silhouette Cameo!

Engagement Silhouette

New Silhouette Cameo = Excitement

I can’t stop feeling thrilled about my new silhouette cameo, which I was really blessed to receive as a Christmas bonus from my work – LTIIT. And… working on my new craft table was awesome!

First Project

After opening up and marveling at how light it was compared to my ecraft, I knew exactly what I wanted to try cutting out first. Awhile ago, I had made a file from one of our engagement photos that I was really excited about. It is an image of us standing together and it made a great silhouette.

Unfortunately, the ecraft could not cut this image out no matter what I tried. It would always mess up either my husband’s pants, or my nose and face. I think that due to the no mat cutting approach of the ecraft, it would always slip a little. Or, maybe my machine is just out of alignment. At any rate – the cameo got it on the first pass! Here is a picture of the finished cut:

Feel free to download the SVG for this file below.
 

Sketching with my Silhouette Cameo

My next thought was about sketches. Now, while the ecraft has a pen and theoretically can cut and draw an image simultaneously, the results are always less than stellar. The pen usually skips or doesn’t write, and the cut is not lined up properly. So, though I don’t yet have the cameo’s sketch pens, I decided to try a makeshift option. I wrapped a pen in some cardstock, stuck it in the cameo, and tada! Here is what I got:

 

So, how did I do it?

Well, for both images, I played around in both gimp and inkscape – both free programs you can download online! For the engagement silhouette, I simply picked a photo that I thought would make a good silhouetted and played with it in gimp. I changed the brightness and contrast dramatically.  Turned the image to grayscale. Simplified it quite a bit and then pulled it into inkscape and hit “Object to Path”. Once I had a path, I simplified it further in inkscape and played a little with the nodes until I was satisfied. Since I don’t have the designer edition of the cameo software, I saved it as a dxf file for import into the cameo studio, and cut it out!

Making the Sketch File

The sketch was a bit more complicated. I started by following directions from this blog post that I pinned. The best thing I learned from that post was about the Eggbott Extension for Inkscape which allows you to fill a path with a hatch. This looks like a sketch and gives you a bunch of open paths – exactly what you want for a cameo sketch file.
 
However, I wasn’t satisfied with the very straight looking results in the post. I explored further and found the path effects editor already in Inkscape! Once you have a bunch of open paths, click one of them and go to Path -> Path Effect Editor. In the drop down, select “Sketch” and hit add. Then play around with the options until you get something you like. Once I had done this and liked my result, I then selected each part one at a time and hit “Object to Path” once more. The results of the Path Effect Editor aren’t turned into paths automatically, so I think this step is necessary. Now, you have a nice sketch! Save as a dxf file, and import it into your cameo software (this took more than a few seconds on my computer – it was a big file!).
Let me know if you have any questions!