A jigsaw made - but not perfect

I finally got one done but it isn't perfect.  I had to use the Cricut on what is called a multicut and the second cut wasn't completely over the first cut.  I am not sure whether I will be able to achieve anything better with the Cricut machine.  I have spent endless hours on this and used up a fair amount of ink and cardboard.

The original picture wasn't of good enough quality so I put together a collage of birds my husband had taken.  It was quite tricky because the edges of the birds had to remain sharp so no blending, smudging etc:

Here are my findings:

1. I think the card for a jigsaw has to be at least 700gsm thick to fit well together once cut.
2. The card needs to be glossy otherwise the card absorbs the ink too much and is fuzzy.
3. Glossy card really needs to be especially for photos.  The ink 'slid' on the glossy card I had.  In the end I used a plain paper setting and reduced the speed of the printer to allow the ink a little drying time.  It was still not nearly as clear as proper photo paper.
4. Pasting proper photo paper onto card doesn't work - the paper tears when cut which is what I expected.
5. The Cricut is limited in it's ability to cut thick card.  I would say 300gsm max.  If you put card in which is too thick you risk messing up the Cricut machine which I may well have done.
6. I didn't put in enough contrast between the background and the birds.  Easy for me but not so easy for my Mom who has bad eyesight.
7. I would make some of the circles that make up the puzzle inserts bigger so that they don't come out.  I generally did a good job of this but not always.

Is it time to give up?  Would so love to give a decent jigsaw to my Mom.  Maybe some more research.

Jigsaw starting to look promising...

I am really pleased with my actual jigsaw graphic.  I  have been testing out cutting a small jigsaw of 12 pieces on ordinary paper and it works well.

I have spent the whole morning trying to cut my jigsaw on different thickness of card with little success.  However, a kind soul answered my plea on a messageboard and suggested I do a 'multicut' (cuts the whole pattern more than once) which I had tried before but with not enough patience!  So I tried again and it worked - it needed 3 cuts!  The card is quite thin but actually quite sturdy and because I am making a large format jigsaw to accommodate my Mother's eyesight I think it will work.  Dare I try the 100 piece jigsaw....

Large Format Jigsaw Puzzle

Well, I am making progress on my Mother's jigsaw.  I now have the svg (scalable vector graphic) file created and ready to test on my Cricut.  Here's a view from inside Inkscape:

Tomorrow I will see if I have time to go shopping to scout for some suitable cardboard to test.  Will be interesting to see how thick I will be able to cut with the Cricut.

I'm on a Mission

My dear Mom is turning 90 in two weeks time.  She loves doing jigsaw puzzles to keep herself busy and I managed to find large format 250 piece puzzles by Emporium.  Three months ago she had a haemorrhage in the back of her right eye and now her eyesight has got too bad to do these puzzles.  She keeps on asking me if I can't get puzzles which have less pieces but I just can't find any these days which are not for children.

I haven't been able to think of a good present that I can buy her.  At her age there's not much that she wants.  So I suddenly thought, that's it, I am going to make her a puzzle for her birthday!  I have a Cricut cutting machine which cuts cardboard and I know how to make the shapes.  So I rushed out and bought a large 100 piece children's puzzle as a guide.  I put it together, turned it over and marked the edges with a thick black pen.  I then divided it up into four sections and scanned each section in (bottom right here) and then merged them all.  I then erased the pink background with the background eraser tool.

I know that because of the thick, rough lines it will not import properly into the Cricut software so I intend to pull the image into Inkscape and draw it from scratch.  It will be a good learning experience for me and although I know it will take me a while, once I have it, I can cut any number of puzzles, any size from A3 downwards!  I can keep Mom happy for ages!

So this is the picture I want to make into my first puzzle.  I will put Happy 90th on the balloon.  This is my family on a ship many moons ago - I'm the little girl on the left.  The well-worn rag dolls were made by my Mom.

I do so hope I can make this work.  If I do, I intend to upload the Cricut file onto the internet so others can use it!

Fabric Painting with a Stencil

I dug through my stash of fabric which had a wash of fabric paint and found one to experiment with.  A wash of Pebeo Setacolor fabric paints had been applied using a sponge.  So using the stencil created in my previous blog, I cut out the stencil on freezer paper using the Cricut machine.  I then ironed the freezer paper onto the fabric and applied some blue paint.  This is the result:

Gee, I'm really quite pleased with that.  The beauty about going through all the hassle of converting the picture to use on my Cricut is that I can cut it out as many times as I want.  The freezer paper can only really be used once for this.

Creating a Stencil

NOTE OCT 2011: Since writing this piece, Provocraft, who manufacture the Cricut, have brought a lawsuit against 2 software companies who used to make software for the Cricut.  YOU CAN NO LONGER GET SOFTWARE FOR THE CRICUT WHICH ALLOWS YOU TO MAKE YOUR OWN DESIGNS!  You can now only use use their cartridges unless you already have the software.

The easiest way of making a stencil using a black and white image like the above (see previous post) is by putting it under a piece of acetate and drawing the outlines with a black permanent pen, making sure there are no areas of detached white (like the nose here). Then cut out the black areas with a craft/Xacto knife and you are good to go...

But, oh noooo, Miss Gadget Girl here has to go the long technical route.  About a year ago I bought myself a Cricut which is used mainly for card making.  However, I saw the potential for making complicated stencils for fabric painting.

So, to be able to use the picture I have here with my Cricut machine, I have to convert it to a vector type image.  Photographs which can be viewed and manipulated in Photoshop Elements are made up of lots of pixels (bitmap) as you see here in this enlarged view:

A vector type image or graphic is made up of lines, points and curves and includes mathematical equations to calculate the shapes.  The advantage of a vector graphic is that you can increase or decrease the size of the graphic without losing any quality whereas you can see above that the more you enlarge a pixelated image the more it loses its smoothness.

To work with vector images you need a completely different software package (the main Photoshop package can deal with vectors but not Photoshop Elements).  So to create vector images for my Cricut, I have 2 software packages, Craft Edge's Sure Cuts A Lot which enables you to use your own graphics with the Cricut and Inkscape which is a wonderful free graphics package.

I open Sure Cuts A Lot (SCAL) and use the trace option to import the image.  This converts the image from a bitmap to a vector.  Once this is done the image can be cut immediately but sometimes, if it is a complex image, it requires a fair bit of editing to make it cut a smoother stencil.  To minimise editing it is sometimes worth printing out the image and smoothing the edges and cleaning it up with a black ink pen and then scanning it back in.

 
Although you can edit these images in SCAL, the editing tools are quite basic and I find them quite frustrating so I now take the image into Inkscape and clean it up there.  I have to say that if you have never used vector graphics before there is a fair bit to learn and if you are not good on the technical side I suggest sticking with the xacto knife!

Here is a close up of the dog's nose showing the vector points which you can move.  When you click on a point you are able to change the curve by manipulating the little 'arms' (see top left of nose).  When the image is first traced there are lots of vector points.  It is worth deleting some points because the cutter will move to each vector point which makes the cutting less smooth if there are many points:

Here is the image in SCAL after it has been cleaned up:

Now I can connect my Cricut to my PC and cut the dog face out.  To make a stencil I cut the image on either acetate, stencil sheets or freezer paper.  Freezer paper can be ironed onto fabric and this makes it easy to fabric paint accurately without paint seeping under the stencil.

The vector images that can be used with the Cricut are SVG images (scalable vector graphics) and there are lots of free SVG images on the internet that you can use with the Cricut (if you have SCAL).  You don't have to make your own if you don't want to.

In the next post I hope to show you the dog face painted onto fabric.