Paper Peonies with Your Cricut, Part Two

This is Part Two of my post on making Paper Peonies with your Cricut.  My first post focused on a beautiful paper peony created by Dreaming Tree, which can be found here: Paper Peonies With Your Cricut

Gorgeous paper peony from the Cricut cartridge called 3D Floral Decor

Although I much prefer the Dreaming Tree paper peony, I want to show you how to create the Cricut Access version of a stemmed peony.  To be honest, I want to show you how to create the Cricut peony, not because it’s prettier or better but actually because it is harder to create.  Why make it harder for you?  Well, so then you learn how to do things!

The Cricut Access peony requires you to manipulate the file quite a bit to achieve a true, peony-sized flower.  Learning to manipulate and change pre-designed files will help you understand how Design Space works AND will help you create the exact file you want.  And that’s what being a Cricuteer is all about, isn’t it?

Okay…let’s get started!

The Cricut peony is from the cartridge called 3D Floral Home Decor, which is free for Access members or–if you are not an Access member–is purchasable as a set or for the individual files.  The 3D Floral Home Decor image set (cartridge) has so many beautiful flowers for all the seasons and I would definitely recommend getting your hands on it if you like making paper flowers.

My issue with the peony file is that the flower is too small for me, but–because of the way it is grouped–the size cannot be changed easily.   After playing with it a while, I have come up with a solution that involves using your contouring feature.

The first steps are (as always) open Design Space and choose New Project.

Go to Insert Image and, at the top, change your view to Cartridges. Once you are in the cartridge mode, scroll down (or search) for the 3D Floral Decor cartridge and open it up. Now choose the peony image and add it to your project.

Here’s a picture to show you how to do this:

When inserting an image, change your view to Cartridges and look for 3D Floral Home Decor

 

While in the 3D Floral Home Decor image set, find and insert the Peony file shown

 

Once you’ve got your image in Design Space, you can see it imports in one piece. Unfortunately when you Ungroup the file, you are only able to isolate the stamens and leaves.  You cannot easily isolate each piece of the flower petals.  This is problematic because I want to make my flower bigger and doing so I would have to cut on a 12″ x 24″ mat using larger paper and, well, some of us don’t have larger mats and/or larger paper.

The peony file imports all pieces of the flower together

I managed a work around this problem by duplicating the flower portion and isolating each petal layer. There are five petal layers, so I duplicate the flower petal group five times.

First duplicate the flower petal layers

Next, you are going to isolate each petal layer, one at a time.  You achieve this by selecting each of your petal layers and remove all but one of the petal layers using the Contour feature.  For each petal layer, you are going to remove a different petal layer, so that when you are finished contouring all five layers, you will end up with five separated layers.  I realize this might be a bit confusing, so I am going to give you some pictures to show you what I mean.

Select each flower piece and hit Contour. Turn off all but one portion of the piece.

Once you isolate each petal piece and contour it out, you end up with each petal layer being separate pieces instead of being grouped together

Perform this “Hide Contour” step for each of the petal layers as shown here with the second layer

 

When you are finished contouring all the layers, you will have isolated each of the petal layers, so that you have five separate petal layers.  Doing this will allow you to resize the flower and even change the color of the petals.

Isn’t that cool?

Now all your petal layers are separated and ready to be resized or to have their layers re-colored

You may think this is a LOT of work for one flower file, but I adore peonies and I don’t mind the extra work to achieve the perfectly sized peony flower!

To get the flowers the size I want them, I then stack up each layer (don’t forget the stamen pieces and leaves!) and group them. By grouping them in a stack, you can manipulate the size of the flower with all the pieces getting resized in the proper proportion.

Stack all the flower pieces together. Don’t forget the stamen and leaves so they keep the proportions!

 

Now you can enlarge the peony to be whatever size you’d like!

 

Plus, you can also change the colors of certain layers!  Here I have changed the innermost petal layers to a lighter pink, which imitates the way most peony blossoms look in real life.  You can do this for all the layers or just a few.  Remember you pick the color of material, so changing them in Design Space just signals to your Cricut machine that it must cut each color separately.  No need to fuss to try to find the “perfect color” for your file.

You can also manipulate the color. Here I changed the inner most petal layers to a lighter pink to create a more realistic finished flower.

 

You are now ready to cut and assemble your peony!

I am not going to go through the assembly of this flower as it is much the same method I have already described here: Paper Peonies With Your Cricut

Completed assembled peony on a stem

 

One last note, I used the We R Memory Keepers “Flower Stem Kit”, which I originally purchased at Michael’s.  My local Michael’s no longer stocks this kit, but you can buy them at  Scrapbook.com here: Scrapbook.com Flower Stem Kit

We R Memory Keepers Flower Stem Kit

 

I do hope you will try making one of these paper peony flowers!  Not only are they beautiful, but they will hopefully teach you some new tricks for Design Space.

I am a Cricut Affiliate, so if you don’t already have the 3D Floral Home Decor cartridge or an Access subscription, you can purchase them using my link: My link to Cricut sale page

If you use my link, I could receive a small commission (depending on what you purchase) that helps to support my efforts here.  Also, using my link AND the code CRICUTNEWBIES1 in checkout will give you free shipping and 10% off some purchases (does not include machines or Access subscription).  Thank you for your support!

 

Access: Cricut’s Subscription Service

A few of the hundreds of projects in Access

I often get asked if Cricut’s subscription service–called Cricut Access–is “worth it”.

My usual answer is “Absolutely”!  But, if you need more convincing than that, consider my situation.

I’ve been crafting with a Cricut machine for over six years now and I remember the days when cartridges (the little devices that would store a set of Cricut images) were so expensive they would lock them up at the craft stores!  Most cartridges at that time retailed for anywhere between $30 and $80 and we “old school” Cricuteers would wait until they went on sale for $20 to stock up on all the latest image sets.  I managed to collect about 150 cartridges, which at an average cost of $20 each, I invested over three thousand dollars in Cricut images!  (And that is NOT an exaggeration!)

Furthermore before the subscription, you used to have to load cartridges into your machine before cutting, making the entire process extremely time consuming.  (Thankfully Cricut eventually did introduce a way to save your cartridges online, eliminating the need to fuss with cartridges anymore, but you still had to rely on using the tiny books to know what images you had or what the cartridges could do.)

The introduction of Design Space forever changed how I managed all my Cricut content, and Access was just the cherry on top of the whole thing!  Even with over 150 of my own cartridges for content, there were still several hundred image sets I didn’t own (Imagine my horror!!) and weren’t even available for me to use…until Access made them available.

Cricut Access Standard

Access introduced me to over 30,000 images, more than 1,000 top-quality projects and an almost dizzying amount of fonts (over 370!) .  With SO many choices and at-my-fingertips use, I am never at a loss for crafting ideas with my Cricut machines.  And for a cost of about $10 a month, I am now saving myself hundreds of dollars in new cartridge purchases just by subscribing.

Some of the Access Only image sets

Ever accommodating, Cricut breaks down their subscriptions into three tiers.  For people who can’t get enough of fonts, for only $5 a month you’ll have over 370 fonts at your fingertips without ever having to search for one again.  Or, if you want more than just fonts, try the Standard Access for about $8 a month and immerse yourself in thousands of images plus the fonts, too!

If you’re an “all or nothing” kind of crafter (like me!), spend just under $10 a month and go for Access Premium.  Premium gives you everything.  All the images.  All the fonts. Plus 50% all digital images not part of the subscription (hint: there isn’t much NOT available!) And always 10% off materials on Cricut.com.

One more thing…I forgot to mention that the folks at Cricut are always adding to their image library and often have Access Only images and projects available.  That means you’ll get to create beautiful projects that other folks would have to search the web for hours to find…all right in Design Space!  Stuff like this:

Hopping Down the Bunny Trail image set

All the Dimensional Scenes image sets are only available on Cricut Access

Cactus Love image set only available on Cricut Access

If I’ve convinced you to give Cricut Access a closer look, please use my link so that I will get a small percentage of any sale you make at the Cricut website:

http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=369132&m=51766&u=1089398

Please note: This blog post contains an affiliate link to the Cricut website, which will result in a small percentage of any sale generated to be credited to the author.