Pochacco for Friends

Been playing around with my new Sure Cuts A Lot Program (SCAL) and Inkscape and trying to learn how to use them whenever I can find some extra time. For my second project, I decided I should choose a simple line image to practice with... and cute little Pochacco fit the bill perfectly! I scanned this image of Pochacco from an old notepad I had and saved it as a jpeg file. I used Adobe Photoshop to clean up the image a little, then imported it into Inkscape, which is a vector graphics editing program. In Inkscape, I converted the jpeg file into a svg file, and tried to clean up the image a bit more so I could get smooth cutting lines when I imported the image to Sure Cuts A Lot to cut. All of this sounds complicated and admittingly had my head spinning in the beginning, but thanks to the awesome and very detailed tutorials by Susan Bluerobot on this, I am slowly learning. At first it seemed like it took me so many steps to get to a cut-able image, but in the end, I found it really was much quicker than trying to design the same in Design Studio. Now all I need is to find time to practice, practice, practice....and hopefully one day I too will be able to do some really fancy cuts!



I used the Pochacco svg file I created to decorate little goodie boxes I recently made for some friends. Filled these with my favorite Yokumoku Cigaru cookies and wrapped them in a cellophane bag finished with a little bow. The box is a Design Studio cutfile created and shared by a very talented lady, Melanie (MeFlick). You can access this round top box cutfile by visiting Melanie's blog, MeFlick's Cricut Cutfiles and More, and clicking on the "box" .cutfile link on her sidebar. Please be sure to leave a comment thanking her if you do. And while you're there, be sure to take a look around, you'll be amazed at all the she wonderful projects she's created in Design Studio as well as with SCAL and generously shares!