A bit of Inspiration...

People frequently ask me how I come up with ideas. I always tell them that inspiration is everywhere! In your daily life you are constantly exposed to designs and ideas that can be adapted and used with the Cricut and Design Studio.



In Massachusetts, there is a store called "Christmas Tree Shops" where you can find all sorts of inexpensive decorative items. They send out flyers every few weeks. I saw this ad for letters to hang on your wall and thought that it would be fun to design some chunky letters with internal flourishes - so I did!



I chose the "Roly Poly" font option on the Plantin Schoolbook cartridge.



I wanted the body of the letters to be thick, but I also wanted the shape to be taller and thinner. In the screen shot above, the letter to the right is a "roly poly D" as it was entered from the keypad. I used the "handles" to adjust it to a taller and thinner letter - but one that still has a good thickness for the cutouts.



I order to have lots of color options, I made one letter with the cutouts and one to be the background. When choosing the cutouts, you need to be sure that the shapes are continuous cuts and that there are no small pieces or centers that won't remain in the design when it is cut.



For this sample, I chose a couple of decorative elements from "Lyrical Letters" and adapted them to fit the shape of the "D." There are many other cartridges that have shapes that could be included within the letter base.



You could use the decorative letter directly on the paper but the extra layer with the solid "D" gives you a chance to add another color to the page.



Here is my sample letter on a 12 x 12 page. The initials would be great for Wedding or Anniversary album title pages.

I have lots of ideas on ways to use these decorative initials - and I will be doing some projects that build on this simple idea. Today I just wanted to share the idea with you.