I Can't beleive it'a been so long...

It's hard to believe that it's been 10 months since my last the last post and the last page I scrapped.  Not sure how I got so side tracked or so uninspired to create anything new. It's not that I haven't taken new pictures,  heck I even bought a new Nikon D3100 digital SLR camera last fall.  2010 seemed to be a year of changes and checks and balances, some subtle and some not so subtle, LOL. Then last week my daughter brought me a project she wanted me to make.  She was going to a baby shower for her friend we have known since they were kids.  The baby's name is going to be Noah and the nursery theme is Noah's Ark.  She requested I make a shadow box of the Ark to go with the bedding she had bought from Baby's R Us.  She brought over a shadow box that was 16x20 showed me the picture of the quilt to get the basic idea of colors and style.  With help from my daughter on what colors and animals this is what I came up with. The ark and Noah are from SVG's I made in Inkscape and cut with Make the Cut.  The animals were cut with Cricut using Animal Kingdom. 

I cut individual planks for the bottom of the ark and layered them on a solid piece. I raised the pieces of the top and bottom of the boat off the mat to give depth to the inside of the port holes and windows.

The animal heads were raised with foam dots to give them some depth as well. All but Noah and the whales were cut with the Animal Kingdom cartridge. The ark, waves and cloud were done with MTC.

Well I may be in trouble now.  I found myself in Joann's picking out paper stacks and found a few new EK punches. Did I mention K & Company has some gorgeous embellishments I couldn't resist.  OMG I think the scrapping bug has returned!

Testing, Testing...

A week ago there was some new buzz on the Cricut message board about a new program called Making the Cut.  It appeared to be along the same lines as SCAL (Sure Cuts Alot) a program I use currently use to cut all my SVG's with after putting them together in Inkscape. I down loaded the trial version and was impressed with the early stages of the program, it looks quite promising and easy to use. Needless to say I bought it due to the fact Andy the guy behind this program seems to be really on his toes and working diligently to get his new product up and going with all the bells and whistles everyone is looking for.  It imports SVG's and other image formats right into the program so they can be moderately adjusted and then cut.  This will work great for a large number of my library images and SVG's I have compiled.  I love that it lets me view the SVG files within the program prior to opening them on my mat. The same with viewing the fonts and moving, adjusting and welding text is a breeze.  Already in the works is the ability to shadow text, which is a must for me.  I know alot of the buzz is people are excited to be able to bypass Inkscape or a simular program but I don't find that the case for me.  I love Inkscape and the ability to rework entire images to get what I want and then save as an SVG to be cut within programs like SCAL or MTC.  This is a quick layout I cut with MTC to give it a test run.  The cuts were precise and it did well on the more intricut filigree pieces.  Kudos Andy I think you've got a winner!  The cut file for the pieces used have been saved in both SVG and MTC formats.