Appliques cut with the cricut and designed with the pen tool

Being a night owl I often times find myself watching those long late night commercials. And I can’t believe that I found  2 of my favorite things to do right now on TV during those infomercials . One of them being Zumba® but that would make for a whole new blog. And the second one is the Cricut® In case you do not know what the Cricut® is: It’s a printer like machine (instead of ink it has a blade) that uses cartridges that hold fonts and images that can be cut out of paper for the scrap-booking community and amazingly it also cuts fabric. When I first saw it, I did a little research online and found a video on youtube showing a lady cutting a cute little cupcake out of fabric and sewing it onto a baby’s onesie. I liked the idea so much and got extremely excited about being able to do this myself. The only thing that was bothering me was the fact that the Cricut® prides itself in being a computer-less product, meaning no need to know any software and no connection to computer required. The Cricut® offers cartridges of which 1-2 are included with the machine and then you have to buy other ones separately. I however envisioned something entirely different. I wanted to draw my own designs inside of Illustrator and then make the Cricut® cut it out of fabric for me. So I did a little more research and found that Provocraft® (maker of Cricut®) came out with a product that is called Cricut DesignStudio ® software. That sounded really exciting until I found out that this product only allows you to use images from the cartridges. I guess it’s a step up for anyone not interested in using a real design software, as I assume that before this software one was only able to cut images from one cartridge at a time? Anyways, after I did some more research I found a website that sells a down-loadable software called “Surecutsalot^TM“<<< love the name>>> and tested it out. Well… after deciding which Cricut® to buy (because they come in different sizes) and finding coupons and some Heat N Bond to stiffen the fabric. And  it works! Ha! Here is short tutorial on what I did (see pics above) First I found my inspiration, which happened to be a towel holder with these cute little elephants. Then I took a picture of them and traced them in Illustrator, then I saved them as a SVG. file. Then opened my elephants (one at a time) in surecutsalot.. hooked my computer per usb up to the cricut and pressed cut. Voila… i had my first computer generated appliques. Which will be used for a baby blanket for my friend daughter. There are some important hints and tips for prepping the fabrics and how to apply it to the actual cutting mat of the Cricut® and which blade setting and so on and since that is all information that I forget as soon as I do it, I am glad that there is a huge community of Cricut® users that share their tips online on the Cricut® message board. Here is the link to the youtube video that inspired me. Here is the link to the Cricut message board Here is the link to the “Surecutsalot^TM” software And you can download my little elephants as Ai files right here. They are on separate Layers.