by Sandy McCauley | Dec 15, 2008 | Cupcake Wrapper, Designing, Welding
I was contacted by a bakery owner in Florida interested in a Klic-N-Kut if she could design and cut her own cupcake wrappers. She sent me to a web site selling some very elaborate designs and I instantly became obsessed with creating a basic file that could then be modified to fit any celebration or any holiday. Once we had a basic scan of a pattern, it was easy to recreate the shape and then simply create words and images to weld to the top, such as this simple Happy Birthday prototype I created:
Then I decided to try a few Christmas designs and they were fun to make as well. Obviously, the possiblities are limitless! Note that you don’t bake the cupcakes with these cutouts… they are meant to be applied after the cupcake is complete with icing and decorations… simply wrap around a cupcake, fold up a tab, insert tab into a cut slit, and reopen the tab.
Here are two links to help you in your own designing. And I promise to not to tell anyone if you prefer to buy the cupcakes from your local grocery store and just cut out your own wrappers to make them look like YOUR OWN CREATIONS! 😛
Link to free zip with KNK files for simple Happy Birthday, Noel, and Basic Pattern for Cupcake Wrapper
*** New *** Cupcake Wrapper Templates for Designing in KNK, MTC, SVG, EPS, PDF, and Studio formats
(Big thanks to Judy Keating for sharing her designs and to Gayle Galura-Scott for converting to .Studio for the Silhouette owners!)
Link to web site selling cupcake wrappers – get some GREAT ideas here!
by Sandy McCauley | Dec 8, 2008 | Breaking Path, Free Files, Free Videos, Making Path, Welding
I heard from my VERY first Klic-N-Kut customer yesterday, Kristi H. She posted about needing to modify a very ornate font. So, I had a look at it and decided that this would make a great tutorial in basic welding. I’m not sure I actually fully understand what Kristi needs, but that’s okay. After watching this, I know she’ll let me know if I went down the wrong path. lol In the meantime, this is what I would want to do with these letters to make them more usable for my own cutting.
I have both the video and the letter “H” that I used for the video, in case you want to play with this same font yourself for practice. Note that I kept it rather simple, but you could include a lot more of the flourishes, if you so desire.
Video on Modifying an Ornate Font
File Used in the Video
by Sandy McCauley | Dec 3, 2008 | Group Viewer
So, Paul C read my blog post and was happy to see that I corrected my previous statement about not being able to edit images once they are grouped. But because I went on to say I wasn’t really sure why anyone would ever NEED to edit while grouped, he sent me a typical example of one of his projects. I was so impressed with his beautiful 3D globe which, by the way, folds up flat to put inside a greeting card, that I wanted to post it here along with a screen shot of one of the pieces, so that you can see why having the internal part safely grouped to the exterior makes a lot of sense. In these very detailed projects, it’s critical that nothing gets misaligned and grouping is a way to protect against that. Thanks, Paul!
🙂
Oh, and Paul initially got his designs from this web site company owned by an obviously very creative and talented lady named Sandy Jackson. Be sure to check out her Cool Projects for some terrific card ideas.
Some Assembly Required
by Sandy McCauley | Dec 2, 2008 | Free Videos, Group Viewer, PDF
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In the final part of this three part series in which I’ve been contacted by “guys out there”, I now thank Paul C for notifying me that you CAN edit vector images from within the Group Viewer. I had specifically said that in order to view the nodes of any particular vector image, you must first ungroup the object from other objects. Uh… wrong! I messed up! 😛
So, I admitted to Paul that he was DEFINITELY correct and I went further and checked out some of the other things you can do when your objects are grouped. Watch this video and note that this may help those of you who import a lot of pdf catalogs from Internet. We often find the images in those pdf files to be grouped and not able to be ungrouped (for whatever reason). But we can use the Group Viewer to identify what’s a vector and what’s a raster, as well as locate raster images to auto-trace from within the viewer. This will all make more sense after you see the video:
Group Viewer Video
by Sandy McCauley | Nov 29, 2008 | Vista 64
A very dear friend of mine, Susan Mast, recently purchased a second Klic-N-Kut to help increase production of embellishments for her mini-album kit business. The only problem is that her husband’s new computer, which she planned to use, had Vista 64 installed. Her husband works for Go Daddy and and is far more knowledgable about computers and has better resources than I do. He posted a response to my initial blog about the Vista 64 issue. Here’s what he said:
After many hours trying to find a solution to this problem I have found one that is so simple it makes me mad I spent so many hours trying to figure it out.
When you boot you system in Windows Vista 64 Bit if you Hit F8 it will bring up the advance boot options. Here is what I found on the Microsoft Developers website:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa906338.aspx
“Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista support the F8 Advanced Boot Option — “Disable Driver Signature Enforcement” — that disables load-time signature enforcement for a kernel-mode driver only for the current system session. This setting does not persist across system restarts”
This basically means you just need to reboot you PC select the “Disable Driver Signature Enforcement” option and install the driver.
It works, I have tested it and have run a test cut.
Also note if you boot your computer and forget to do this the driver will again not work, and you will have to reboot and disable it again.
The article also mentions a registry edit if you want to brave those waters.
Hope this helps all of you out there, having the same problem.
Chad Mast
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Chad later notified me that because of the hassle of doing this, he ended up installing a second version of Windows on their computer… an earlier version, so that they could install the driver without having to deal with this each time they started up the computer. This may be the best option for those with the 8″ Graphtec cutters (Craft Robo, Silhouette, and Wishblade) since the earlier method hasn’t been successfully used by any of those owners to my knowledge.
I will update this post as I receive more information and updates. This is all outside my realm of expertise, so I greatly appreciate it when someone emails me or posts about this topic. Thanks, Guys!
Update #1: Terry N emailed me to let me know that Quickutz plans to have a Vista64 driver available to their Silhouette owners by the end of January. That’s great news!
