Scalloped Heart Tutorial

I wanted to share this file quickly since many people are working on Valentine's Day projects now.  For a variety of reasons that I won't go into now, I haven't made a video but I will explain briefly how I designed this heart.  I used Plantin Schoolbook for the heart but you could try with any other cartridge with a circle.  A heart shape is helpful but not required.

There are more and more cartridges with scalloped shapes available.  Standard scalloped squares, circles, rectangles and ovals are on quite a few cartridges.  Regularly shaped scalloped hearts are a bit harder to find.  There are some wonderful scalloped hearts on the Martha Stewart Cake Art cartridges.

You can use one of these hearts as a template to help you design a plain scalloped heart from circles and other shapes.  I chose this heart from the MS Seasonal Cake Art cartridge and placed a four inch image on the mat.

Then I selected a circle from the Plantin Schoolbook cartridge and adjusted the size to fit neatly in one of the scallops.

You can quickly fill the outline of the shape with circles by copying and pasting and repositioning the circle.  To make  the process go more quickly use the keyboard shortcuts "control C" to copy and "control V" to paste and hold down the "alt" key to temporarily make the handles disappear as you place the circles around the heart.

You can work on the same page as the template heart or you can preview the heart and work on another layer of the file to create the circle outline of the heart.

When all of the circles have been placed you can preview the design.  Be sure to weld the circles.  If you checked weld on the very first circle before copying and pasting each circle will already be welded.  If you did not check weld for the first circle, you can click your mouse on a corner of the mat and drag it to include all of the circle shapes and then check weld for the entire group at once.  You now have a frame which needs to be filled in.

For this heart, I added the heart from Plantin Schoolbook and stretched and squeezed it a bit to fit the heart shape.

When I previewed the design, there were four spots where the heart left a gap between the edge of the heart and the heart frame made from circles.

 I added a couple of circles that I stretched and rotated to cover the gap areas.

When the design is previewed, there are some problems with the welds.  The gaps remain on one side and the new shape will cut from the shape without welding.

To fix this, you need to change the order in which the items are added to the design and "burp" the heart.  To do this, simply select one of the outer circles near the inner circle that covers the gaps and then Copy-Delete-Paste the circle back again.  Do this for both sides - you may have to do it to more than one of the outer circles but eventually the preview will show proper welds.

Here is the final shape.  There are two circles near the top that I adjusted to be slightly larger to keep a good fit and continuity with the design.

Here is the preview of the scalloped heart.  To change the size of the entire shape, click on the mat and drag your mouse to the opposite corner around the items in order to select them.  Then hold down the control key and use the handles on the one items in the shape to resize the group as a unit.
 

I decided to make a separate layer with the circles only to use as a trim on the heart shape.  I did this by simply copying and pasting the circles to another mat.

If you want to do a color preview, you will need to click, drag and select the entire group for the heart or the frame and then uncheck the weld box.  Be sure to redo the weld before cutting or you will have a mess!

The Martha Stewart cartridges are full of great images, fonts, borders and sentiments.  You will probably want to add all of them to your collection because they are so versatile.  It would be very difficult to recreate most of the images.  However, if you need a certain shape right away (perhaps you are a late night crafter like me?) and don't have the cartridge with the image you want, you can sometimes use Design Studio or the Gypsy to make your own version.

It doesn't take too long to make this heart and I encourage you to try it out following these directions.  If you are impatient you can download my file at the link below.  This is still a 4shared link as I haven't had time to set up a new account somewhere else.  I hope that there will not be any issues with the downloads after all of the trouble I had with the gypsy files.  This is a Design Studio file.

These are my trial cuts. I'll add some bling and use them for a card.  They would also make cute "paper cookies" for a Valentine's tree (I wonder if any of you put up a Valentine's tree?).

What other sweet projects are you working on?  I hope this heart comes in handy for you.

Scalloped Heart

Happy Australia Day to all of  my Aussie friends! 
I am finishing my packing today and should be flying to LA early tomorrow morning to meet up with Mandy, Jane, Enfys and lots of others at CHA.  Keep your fingers crossed for me that the storms don't keep me from flying... 


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