Circus Images cut with Cricut and Blown-up Life Size

Yesterday I shared with you a .mtc and .svg file of a circus elephant balancing on a ball.  Today, I wanted to show you what we did with him.  We created large cutouts using plywood to decorate our carnival with Circus animals and performers.  To do this, I cut out the shapes with my cricut as large as I could on a 12x12 mat.  We then took those shapes and used an overhead projector to trace the images much larger onto plywood.  We then used a saw to cut them out, we painted them and volia - great circus images decorating our school for our week long Greatest Webbfest on Earth celebration!  The stars on the balls were cut using vinyl with my cricut. These pictures show the elephant I shared yesterday blown up and painted.  We also used a lot of the images from the Lite Carousel Cartridge from PC.  We created clowns, Lions, a Lion Tamer, Dancing Bears, a Circus train, a Circus Tent, a canon, popcorn boxes, ticket booth, large tickets, and more!  Everybody loved them!  Thanks for stopping by.  Please feel free to leave a comment with any questions and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Can You Say Circus?!? Circus Elephant on Ball - MTC or .svg File

Hello.  Welcome to the Circus!  I have been busy at my children's school the past few weeks helping make decorations for our annual carnival fund raiser "Webbfest" that we do each year.  This year's theme was the Greatest Webbfest on Earth and was based on the Circus.  I will show you several things that I did to help the decorations committee.  This is the first one.  This is from a coloring page we found simply by doing a google search for free circus coloring pages.  I then used my Make the Cut software to pull it in and create a cut file for use with my Cricut machine.  I have then used my MTC software to export it out as an .svg file for use by those who may use other software and/or cutters.  (I took that .svg file and broke it apart in Inkscape and that is the file I am sharing here).

Isn't he cute?!  If you would like my MTC file you can download it here.  If you would like the .svg file, you can download it here.  Sorry, but you cannot use .mtc or .svg files with Design Studio (DS) or the Gypsy. However, I will be showing you some cute things we made with the PC cartridge, Carousel, as well.  I bought that cartridge specifically for us to use with our Carnival this year.  Money well spent as we did LOTS of things with it.  However, they really wanted an elephant on the ball like this one and there wasn't one on the cartridge.  So, I quickly found this one and made the file and cut him out for them.  They were amazed how easy it was to do!
Just a quick note:  If you have been considering purchasing MTC, you might want to do so this week.  A new and improved version of MTC is coming within the next few weeks and if you already own MTC, there is never a charge to upgrade.  However, there are some significant new features that are being added as well as support for use with at least one other cutter and I suspect (have no actual knowledge of it however) that there might be a price increase coming with these new improved features.  The software will still be worth the money with the new features being added BUT why pay more if you don't have too?

To find out more about Make the Cut go to their website here: http://www.make-the-cut.com/
Note:  I am not affiliated with MTC and I do not get any money for others purchasing it.  I am just a happy user who knows what all you can do with it and that even more is coming very soon.  MTC and SCAL both are why I still have my Cricuts and didn't buy another cutter because they let me truly create as I want! However, since I still have my Cricuts, Gpsy, and DS I still buy cartridges thus a win-win for me and PC!

Pencil Pals - George, Animal Kingdom & Expression (Great Teacher Gift!)

My friend Rheba (aka DazyCutr on the Cricut MB) brought me over a February 2006 Edition of the Scrap & Stamp Arts magazine put out by scottpublications.com. She had purchased it at a yard sale earlier in the week. In the magazine there was an article by Jeanette Foxe entitled "Zoo Pencil Pals". Jeanette had used a set of stamps from Close to My Heart called "Zoo Friends" to create some adorable "Pencil Pals". Rheba wanted to know if I could recreate something like them in Design Studio. They didn't look that difficult so I said I would give it a try! Here are some "samples" of the files I created. I created the giraffe, an elephant, and a lion. I used George for the rectangle, feet and small holes and Animal Kingdom for the heads. I welded the head to the rectangle (which makes the "facial features" go away) and then added another separate head to cut out to get the facial features. Although I have layed these out using the Expression and the 12x12 mat, I believe they could be done on the smaller bugs and 6x12 mats if you rotated them around and only put one on the mat. The .cut file has all 3 of the animals, the girafee and elephant are on one page, the lion is on another page. It would be very simple to create more of the animals from Animal Kingdom. just delete the lions head and replace with the animal of your choice or copy and paste the necessary pieces. (Note: the giraffe and elephant were my first test cuts, I then "tweaked" the file for the lion as far as the number of holes and size, etc. to work better - then I "fixed" the giraffe and elephant file. However, the picture shows my original samples which is why there is an extra hole or two on those, again - this is fixed in the .cut file).

If you want the file, you can download the Pencil Pals .cut file here. Thanks Rheba for this great idea!