Three new Martha S. papercraft templates

I was so busy with my wordbook for Dominic's mom that I didnt get a chance to post a project on Martha Stewart's show/site that I liked and thought would be useful for our Cricut. They call it a Mother's Day purse, but it could be adapted for anything you like, including SCAL! You can visit her site with the instructions here. The templates for it are here (in PDF format, you'll need Adobe Acrobat to view/use them) and here.

Another project on her show recently was an adorable bird mobile to create from paper bird and flower cutouts, with brown floral tape covering a wire hanger, reminiscent of an Oriental flowering tree. Templates for the birds, in PDF form, are perfect to import into Inkscape and then into SCAL for the simple little birds. She used punches for her flowers and leaves but we can make our own and have the Cricut cut them out! Here is the link to the instruction page.

I have created a file, available free for download, to be used with SCAL, to accompany this project. It's a few simple small flowers, some with center holes and some without, and a couple of different leaves. There are 4, 5, and 6 petal flowers, and leaves both with and without veins. After they're cut, you can choose to cut a small slit between petals to the center (in the holeless flowers) and overlap the end petals to make them 3-d, if you like! Here is the link to my faux hydrangea file. Let me know if you have any problems! I couldn't get Mediafire to work tonight...so this is an experiment! Here's a screenshot:

To use my file in the most efficient way, open it in Inkscape, and copy the flowers/leaves you wish to cut, paste as many times as you'd like into a new file. Save the new file and cut that one in SCAL. That way you'll only cut the ones you really want to cut.

You can copy/paste multiple copies of the flower you wish to cut in your new Inkscape file, as many as you need, instead of doing it in SCAL. TIP: If you like the flowers with holes in the center but the hole is too large, you can use the holeless flower and then add a circle shape in the size you want the hole to be to the center of the flower in SCAL. If you don't weld it, it will cut out the center of the flower. TIP: Make your paper size 12" in Inkscape (File, Document Properties, Custom Size, change from PX to IN, type 12 in the boxes for height and width) before adding your copied shapes, and save your file like that; when you import it into SCAL, import it at 12" and the size of your flowers won't change between programs! Dan99 has a wonderful video on how to make that change permanent on his blog.

Finally, another project she just had on her show today. She made large paper poppies, which were just so bright and pretty! They would make a beautiful project for SCAL and the Cricut! I believe that cardstock would work perfectly for this project. A template is here on her site. Here's the link to the actual project. She puts the video on her site a day after it's shown on her TV show if you can't find it yet. Let me know if you find this information useful or make one of the projects! I'd love to see them. Happy cutting!