Full Page (well nearly) Leaf Frame

I am not sure why I have such a fascination with frames but here is another one! I had been working on a frame with lots of flowers using George for the rectangles and keep running into the dreaded "red X" screen when I tried to finish all the welds. I think I read on the Cricut message board that there is a "glitch" with the rectangle on George. So...not to be defeated by a mere cartridge...I thought "there must be a rectangle on Plantin Schoolbook for all the Expression owners, I'll try that!" I chose the leafy branch from Stretch Your Imagination as the decorative element since many people would have it if they purchased the four cartridge bundle version of the Expression. Once again - if you have mastered "burping" your welds you can put in whatever images or words you desire for your pages.

I intended to have the frame exactly 12 x 12 and set up the rectangles to go to the edges of the mat (having lost my fear of going off the mat when I did the lattices in my last post) but my Cricut had a mind of it's own. Here is the screen shot of the design



Looks like it should work but there was a bit of a problem. Here is a photo of the cut design on the mat



If you look closely you will see that the outer rectangles vary significantly in width even though they were all designed to be 1/2 inch wide.

Here are close ups of the corners - upper left (as you look at the CDS screen)




Upper right



Lower left


Lower right



As you can see, the sides vary from just under 3/8 inch to just over 5/8 inch - to get a pleasing result I had to trim the frame - here is a photo of the cut straight off the mat showing the uneven sides.



I couldn't leave it lopsided so I used my CM 12 inch straight trimmer and took 1/8 off each of the "thick" sides. This wasn't quite enough so I took another 1/8 off for a total of 1/4 inch.



Here is the trimmed page with the four "slivers" removed (you can do a full 1/4 inch and trim only twice - I was not thinking clearly as I did this!)



While this was not my original plan, I actually like the frame with the very narrow outside border (approximately 1/8 inch of the black paper underneath shows on each side).

So now I will work on some more variations of this file. If you try this file, just remember to get your paper on the mat precisely - load the mat carefully and be prepared to do the small trimming adjustments. (If you try this file and do not need to trim please let me know - I may be doing something wrong on my machine!)

So here again are some ideas of possible ways to use this with your photos. The center opening is exactly 7 x 7 inches and you can place a matted 4 x 6 photo at the top, center or bottom as the next three photos show








This leaves room for a title or journaling but I don't really like the effect.

I would recommend a special photo cropped square to center in the frame or possibly four 3 x 3 photos (could replace one or more with journaling or a title) or a few wallet size photos arranged in the center square as shown in these last photos

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12 x 12 Leaf Garland Frame