Design of the Week 'Joy To The World' - 11th December 2018 (A Beginner's Tutorial)

Hello, hello - it's Wednesday so it must be DOTW day!

Today we have a very usable design - you could cut it from htv and use it on a t-shirt or a baby onsie, use it for a card or scrapbook title but today I have decided to use it for a simple, but effective, parcel tag.

I started by opening a tag shape from my library, I used this one but you could use any one you have. This one is on sale at the moment and is only £0.39!

I removed everything but one of the tag shapes by ungrouping the design and deselecting one tag then using my delete key to remove everything else. 

Next I resized the tag to 4.75 tall and 3 ins wide.

1. Chose 'Transfer Panel'.

2. Select 'Scale'

3. Lock the padlock by clicking on it (this will keep the ratio the same) and change the width dimension to 2.5ins,

Add to your tag. 

(1) I then choose a font called Curly Tail as this was one that I already had and looked quite similar to the other writing.

I wrote the words 'love and' and changed the font size to 100.(2) Finally, I welded the letters together (3)

Add this to your tag also.

Next, you are going to differentiate the cut areas from the sketch pen areas.

Ungroup your 'Joy to the World'

Select just the J Christmas Tree and Y and and the tag 'hole' - use ctrl x to cut them from the design.
Change all the remaining design to a blue line.

Add an offset to just the tag by selecting the tag and using the offset button.

Before deselecting the offset change the line colour to red.

ctrl v will paste back the word JOY.  Drag the Christmas tree off your canvas and you will then have all the cut lines in red and all the sketch lines in blue. 

Group all the blue lines together and all the red lines together. Then ctrl x and remove the red lines.

Put a sketch pen in your machine and using the correct settings for sketching sketch the blue lines.  DO NOT REMOVE THE MAT FROM YOUR MACHINE.  ctrl v to return the red lines, select the blue lines and ctrl x to remove them. Cut the red lines.  You can now backfill the J and Y with red paper/card.

The final step I took was to make the Christmas trees. Copy the tree ctrl c and paste onto a new canvas ctrl p ready to cut from green card.  I decided that I wanted to add gems to my tree so ungrouped it and removed the little circles so that only the tree was cut out.  Once cut I added the tree to my tag with foam pads  and added the gems.

I hope this very long tutorial has been helpful and given you lots of tips and tricks.

See you again next week x