Guest Designer at Paper Dolls! and a Giveaway!

Thanks for coming to visit!

If you just came from the Paper Dolls then keep reading for all the details about my guest designer project.

If not, GO visit them right away, then come back! Lol!

So anyways,

I feel especially honored to be one of the first guest designers on The Paper Dolls blog! Tamara and Thienly are seriously amazing and uber talented women! I have stalked admired their blogs and creative projects for quite some time now. Seeing as how they ARE the "paper" dolls, I didn't even want to try to compete with their paper crafting skills so I went another direction with this challenge. The point is to show people ways they can use SVG's right.

Many people don't realize that you can actually cut fabric on your Cricut machine. I'm gonna show you how to do it! Bear in mind, it can be a little frustrating, and the settings that I use may or may not work for your type of fabric, but if you really want to do it, it's worth the adjustments and test cuts to get it right.

I wanted a way to "Thank" these dolls for letting me be a part of their new adventure, and also help them get the word out about their new blog. So I decided to make iron-on fabric appliques for t-shirts and I'm sending each "doll" a shirt of their own! When they wear it they will be getting free advertisement for their blog and at the same time showing off all the fun things you can make with your die-cutting machine.

**Here's the fun part, there is a shirt in it for one of you lucky followers as well!! (I'll explain at the bottom of this post)**

Now let's get down to business!

How to Cut Fabric with Your Cricut:

You will need:
Light cotton fabric
Heat n Bond - iron on adhesive ( I used a no sew, ultra hold type)
    (available at Joann's or local fabric store)
Brand NEW Cricut cutting blade
Iron
SVG's, cut files, or Cricut Cartridges

Okay, got my fabric. Check.

Got the Heat n Bond. Check.

Super Cute SVG files. Check.

STEP 1: Cut a piece of Heat n Bond to your desired size. I cut it into a
12 x 12 square to fit onto my Cricut mat.

STEP 2:  Read the Heat n Bond directions and apply (with an iron) to the wrong side of your fabric as instructed.

STEP 3: Then cut your fabric out around the square. (Ironing the Heat n Bond on first helps eliminate the amount of fraying you will have along your fabric edge.)

STEP 4: Replace the blade in your Cricut cutting machine with a NEW blade.That's very important! Adjust your settings. (For my fabric weight and Heat n Bond thickness I had to use a blade depth of 5 and pressure at MAX.

STEP 5: Load your fabric onto the cutting mat, fabric side up, and Press firmly to adhere. (Helps if you have a fairly new mat also.)

STEP 6: Load the mat into the machine and press cut. It really is THAT easy!

(If this is your first try I would recommend doing a small test cut first, checking to make sure it cut all the way through your fabric before cutting out a whole bunch of stuff.)

When it's done cutting, take out the mat and carefully lift off the pieces. I LOVE my little hook tool that came with my Cricut tool set, so I use that for just about everything. (It's even better than the spatula!)

I pulled the fabric pieces right off the Heat n Bond backing, so I had to later go back and remove all that paper backing from my Cricut mat.

I FILLED up my mat with cuts and after about the 3rd fabric my blade was already dulling. I continued using it however, and just had to snip away a few spots that didn't cut all the way out. You can see them in between the doll's dresses.

Although you could really go through blades quick doing this, I actually got a LOT of stuff cut out with one blade, and it will still be plenty sharp enough for cutting paper.  See all the cuts I got....

You could really have a lot of fun with this stuff! Now all you do is figure out where you want to apply your applique and iron it on. (Again, refer to your Heat n Bond instructions for this part.)

Here's just a few of the designs I came up with, but the  possibilities are endless!

I even made these cute fabric flowers to go on the shirts with some leftover fabric!

Looks cute on bags too!

Like my shirt?!! Now here's the cool part! You could win a Paper Dolls shirt of your own!!! All you have to do is become a follower of my blog, and leave me a sweet little comment on this post telling me you did!  I also have a facebook page, and if you come "like" me over there too you will get an extra entry for the drawing (just leave me another comment telling me you did)! See how much I like comments! Lol!

I will pick a winner (at random) next Sunday before "the dolls" kick off their next challenge, so you have to either come back to see who I announce the winner is, or leave me a way to contact you.

Thanks for stopping by! Hope you like what you see, and let me know if you have ANY questions!! Hugs!

Oh, and did I mention how much I "heart" paper dolls?!!!!!!!  :-)

Remember the Cupcake Box Tutorial?

So, a super talented lady at Create Me Pink found my cupcake box tutorial and put a cute new spin on it! She even made a video tutorial to show you how it's done! It's a little long, but totally worth it if you want to make one. Go check out her blog and see all the other cute stuff she's made too!

Create Me Pink: Valentine's Day Cupcake Box

How to Change your Background

Okay. Ready for this super easy "How to Change your Blog Background" tutorial? Let's Do it.

Blogger's has a sweet Template Designer that eliminates the need to play around with that messy HTML code! It helps you change lots of options on your blog such as font colors, links, borders, templates, AND backgrounds!

This is especially nice if you want to create your own background from Digital Scrapbooking kits in Photoshop or another editing program and upload them directly through blogger. Or, you could just as easily choose any photo from your computer or on the web.

Here's how to change your blog's background:

1. From your blogger Dashboard click on "Design".

2. You should be taken to the "Page Elements" page under the "Design" tab. There's this nifty little "Template Designer" button. Click on it.

3. In the left column click on "Background" and next to the background image is a little down arrow. Click on that too.

4. A window pops up that looks like this. Click on "Upload Image" at the top left. Then you can "Browse" through your files to find an image for your background. They recommend 1800x1600 pixels.

I made my background image at 1600x1100 px/in and it ended up being too big and gets cut off on the bottom of the screen. Then I figured out that my computer monitor has a resolution of 1600x900, but in my browser window I have all the toolbars on top and bottom so the actual height that I can see is probably only about 675px. so that's why I can't see the whole background.


*TIP- If you are designing your own background from scratch*

Depending on other people's screen resolutions they might see more or less of the background than you can. A helpful tip  *You should try designing your website for your audience. But you might not know what type of screen resolutions your visitors have if you don't have analytics set up for your site..... That's okay. I have found that 1280x1024 and 1024x768 seems to be the most common sizes and I'll show you how to optimize your design for all screen types by tiling your image. So that, for instance, even I can see your design across my entire screen at 1600px wide.

Anyways, back to the tutorial.....

5. After your image has uploaded, click on it so it is highlighted in orange and hit "Done".

Now you should see this:

6.  Click on the drop down arrow next to "Alignment". Select the top middle button (which will pull your background up to the top of the window and center it).

7. Then click on the next drop down arrow below, mine says "Don't tile", I'm not sure if this is the default so yours might say something else.

Okay here's where it will matter what screen size other people have and how much of your background they will be able to see.

I think the best solution is to "Tile" your image. This means that your image will repeat on the sides and bottom of your website, which works out nicely if someone has a larger screen than your background image.  *If you choose "Don't tile" then other people with larger screen resolutions than your photo will see white space (mine is gray space) around your background image. Which doesn't look very pretty and appealing.   ;-)

Here's a few examples:

Tile Vertically *notice the gray areas to the sides where it is not tiled

Tile Horizontally *notice the bottom is gray, (the top is not because we aligned our image to the top).

Completely tiled (looks like 6 of the same picture)

"Don't Tile" option

Now keep in mind that in the above examples I have my browser zoomed way way out to see so much of the background.

8. Now this is a personal preference, but I like a "static" background, which means it doesn't move when you scroll up and down, so I leave "Scroll with page" unchecked.  But if your background has a nice repetitive style you might want to experiment with it. On the other hand, if your background is busy it might distract too much from your content with so much going on.

Play around with that for a second and decide which way you like best.

Almost done...........

9. Last thing to do is make our blog transparent so your background shows through. In the left column click on "Advanced", then "Backgrounds" in the second column.

 

Now Change all the color settings to "transparent".

**On a side note, if your background image is dark, or too busy and distracting you might want to leave these settings alone, but this is where you could change their color if you wanted.

 

10. Just click on "Apply to Blog" in the upper right hand corner to save your changes.

Yay! You're done! Good Job!  Now Click on "back to blogger" and it will take you back to your "page elements" tab. From there just click on "View Blog".

I hope everything worked for you and this tutorial was helpful, not confusing! :-) Aren't you so excited now that you can change your blog background as often as you like? I SURE AM!