Olympic Rings

The Olympic Rings helped me to figure out how to weld and make the resulting design a single unit - I had discovered that we could now weld silhouetted shapes and letters and I was planning to create a file for the rings since everyone is watching the Olympics these days. I tried nudging the lower two rings into place with the up/down buttons and the light bulb came on! The step by step tutorial on how to do this is on my blog post from August 21st - here is the LINK

I have set up this file on a few pages - the first page will cut a full set of rings which are 2 inches in diameter. I cut this in black.



The second page is set up to cut the other four colors (red, blue, green and yellow) individually so you can create a full color set. Here is the mat set up to cut (I actually have two sets on the mat but you can delete the second four if you don't need them - or add additional rows).



I hate to end up with scraps that are not very useful so I planned the placement to cut the rings in the center of a three inch squares - the offcuts look like this and can be used for other projects. (In my sample the two yellow square were a bit smaller - just center them within the mat area for that color to get a circle in a square.



Here are the rings - they are rather thin so be careful when you remove them from the mat if you use paper instead of cardstock for the layers.



The true Olympic rings are interwoven so I checked for an image to be sure that I crossed the colors at the correct intersections. For an interesting Wikipedia article about the Olympic symbols, click HERE. Below is an image of the rings



You need to snip the color overlays and the base to create this effect. Snip each color once



and the base in four places - it is a bit hard to show but if you study the image you will see which color goes under or over.



As usual, I found it easier to apply the adhesive to the base - just be careful not to place any on the center black ring which will not have an added layer. You have to carefully manipulate the paper into the correct position and add a bit of adhesive on the back to hold the two areas where the black rings are cut.



This is very simple and a good project to try on your own to get used to nudging but I am including the file if you are in a hurry to make these! On the third page of the mat are a few extra copies of the design at various sizes.

Olympic Rings