Welding in a Circle - I finally found a way!

I have been trying for weeks to figure out a way to weld images inside of a circle and found frustration at every turn! I thought there certainly would be a way to get two sets of parentheses from one of the font cartridges to do the trick but none of the ones I tried were consistent enough in width. I was working on this back before Valentine's Day and the cuts in the photo below were the best I could come up with - and not satisfactory!



Today, I was looking at the various feature keys on Joys of the Season and saw a shape that inspired me to try again. It is actually a layer for the jingle bell which is the shift of the rocking horse (center row, sixth key from the left). Now why wasn't that obvious to me before?!?




So, not being terribly original, I decided to try to weld the word "circle" inside a circle. By using four of the JOTS jingle bell layers and welding them "just so" I was able to get what I thought was a decently even circle. I then used Alphalicious, typed out the word "circle", welded and placed it inside the circle. On the first preview the inner edge of the circle was gone (as it is whenever you do a square) but by "burping" the design (copying and pasting one of the four circle sections away from the design, deleting that section from the circle and adding back the copied section) I was able to get it to work! EUREKA! (OK, I know I sound like a crazy person but I was so determined to find a way to do this and had been thwarted so many times!)



This is how it looked when I removed the outer offcut - there are little "ears" left over that would have been used as a layer on the handle of the jingle bell.

Here it is when I took it off the mat!



Next I tried to put in a flower from our old standby George - worked like a charm!

Here it is on the mat



and again after it was removed and placed on a blue background.



Knowing that some of you would want to try this but would may not have the George cartridge, I did one using the star from Plantin Schoolbook. Here is a photo of that cut next to the first one



So, give this a try - I have all sorts of ideas of ways to use this and will get busy on them but wanted to share my "breakthrough" right away.

Here are the simple files for these two demonstrations of the circle welding - you have to have Joys of the Season to do this (do you think I can get a commission from Provo Craft!?!)

You don't need to use a full sheet of paper - just be sure to place your paper in the proper area of the mat. A piece 5 x 5 inches will be more than enough if you place it correctly. When I watched these cut, the Cricut did the little "ears" or bell handle layers last. If you watch the progress of cutting carefully, you could stop your machine just before that last part of the cut but I am reluctant to try that - I don't think the "waste" is significant enough and I don't want to harm my machine (I have to research whether this is OK to do on a regular basis - I have only used it to stop the machine when the paper got loose once - to avoid jamming the blade). You could always save those little bits and use them on something later!

Flower in a circle

Star in a circle

I'll be posting more creations using this concept soon - if you do some please share through a comment here or by posting to the Cricut message board (there is a link to the message board in the right column). Have fun with this!