Sunday, June 14, 2009

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!

9 comments:

  1. Hi Eunice,
    How the heck did you do this??? You are amazing. Wish I could pick your brain for a day... Thanks for sharing this. Pochacco was always one of my favorite Sanrio characters. When are they gonna make him for Cricut or Sizzix???
    Jenny
    crazyforpaper.blogspot.com

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  2. you are doing a great job glad toat my lessons are helping you keep up the great work

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  3. Hi Eunice! Wow I haven't seen any Pochacco creations until now! IMPRESSIVE!

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  4. Cute gifts and the yokomoko cigars are so ono. I just discovered your playlist and Cristofori's Dream is one of my favorites.

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  5. So cute Eunice! You did a great job! I was trying to convince my hubby to buy SCAL for me. Is it worth it?

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  6. Awesome job Eunice! You always amaze me with everything you create!

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  7. Very cute Eunice!! Love that you used Pochaco, he was one of my favorite sanrio characters!
    Hugs
    Jodi =)

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  8. this is so awesome! Pochacco is mine and my daughter's favorite sanrio character! you did a great job creating him! I can't wait till they bring him back! TFS! this came out so wonderful!

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  9. Cute, Eunice - I'm too chicken to use the SCAL program. I need more input from you - do you think it'll ruin my Cricut? I'm scare to take a chance... anyways, love how you made this one - I'm sure it would be so much easier using that program, than trying to figure out the Cricut DS, ya?

    Hugs,
    JEn

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