Hello and welcome to Day 6 of the Halloween Craft Countdown,
where I'm releasing a brand new craft
project every day for the whole of October.
Today, it's time for a a Design Space only project.
And I'm going to show you how you can make your very own split picture monograms.
Now, this is something that I see
requested so often in the Cricut Facebook groups.
So I'm happy to be able to share with you this technique today.
So as you can see from what's on your
screen, you can take any picture and then split it along the middle and add your
family name or even a first name to create beautiful monogram designs.
Your finished designs can then be cut
from vinyl, either heat transfer vinyl and put on a T-shirt or tote bag or
something like that, or removable vinyl for a canvas.
Or you could even print out from card and frame it on the wall.
So let's jump into Design Space and see how to make split picture monograms.
So to make a split picture monogram, we first need to find a picture.
So I'm going to look in Cricut Access and try and find a cute little pumpkin.
So I want one that's fairly simple.
So not too many layers and also,
because we're going to be cutting the middle out, then
we just need to make sure that it doesn't have anything important in the middle.
So, for example, this one with a little
face wouldn't be suitable because you'll end up cutting half the mouth off.
So let's have a look and see.
I think this one would work well because
it's all one color, which is nice, although because the stalk is separate,
I might actually make that a different color.
I'll show you how to do that.
I'm happy with that one.
So let's select that image and then make it a bit bigger.
Let's say six inches wide.
And I think I might it looks a little bit tall and thin, so I'm just going to
squeeze it a bit. I kind of prefer that as the shape and then I'll zoom in
so it's a little bit easier to see. All right.
So what we need to do is we need to cut
a part out of the middle for our name to go on.
So to do that, go into shapes and choose a square,
click on the little padlock.
so you can make a rectangle and then you can click and drag it so that it covers
the whole space along the edge of the pumpkin.
So this needs to be wider than the pumpkin there.
So bigger than where you put your names, so make
sure that you choose a height that you're happy with.
When you're happy, you've got that in the right place.
Select both layers either by clicking
and dragging around them or choose one in your layers.
panel and press control and then click
on the other one, and then down the bottom of the layers,
click on 'Slic'e and that's going to cut the rectangle out of the pumpkin.
So you'll get all of these layers called
Slice Results, and you can just delete the top three and then you're left with this.
What I want to do is I want to connect
to these pieces with a little rectangle that's going to sit just outside,
which seems to be kind of how these are normally done on these split pictures.
Go into shapes again and choose another square,
click the padlock icon and I'm going to make this quite narrow and then line up.
I'm going to do the bottom first as that one's longer.
So I'm making this just longer than the pumpkin.
And I'm just going to move it down a bit so that it slightly sits over the top.
I'm going to right-click and duplicate that
and then move it up to do the same on the top one.
I want to make sure these are exactly
lined up down the left and the right. Select both layers by clicking one
in the layers panel press control, and click the other one and then go into "Align"
and "Align Left" and you see that shifted that top one.
So now these are perfectly aligned.
I also want to center them them all, so select all
three layers and go into "Align" and "Center horizontally".
And that's put the pumpkin exactly in the middle of my lines horizontally.
So I've got the same amount of space on each side.
Go into both of your lines and make them the same color as the pumpkin
and then select all of your layers,
go down to the bottom of the layers, panel and press "Weld".
And you can see my weld didn't quite work.
I obviously didn't have my bottom bit lined up enough because I've got a gap
between them you can see with this black line.
So I'm going to undo that weld.
Find my bottom and just, oops,
move it down a little bit more, so it's definitely covering the pumpkin
and then I'm just going to do the aligning again,
and horizontally. All right.
So let's try that welding again - click weld.
And this time you can see it's worked
because there's no black line along that bottom bit.
OK, so now I can go into the Text tool and add in my name.
Let's go for a Elizabeth.
I want this to be a nice script
font, so I'm going to select the word and go into the fonts dropdown.
I'm going to click "system" so that I'm just looking at the fonts on my computer
because I know I've got quite a lot of script fonts
and just have a little look down and find one that I want to use.
So you don't want to choose one that's too
thin, otherwise it will be really hard to cut out with the Cricut machine.
So maybe that one, I think that's probably quite a good,
um, a good width.
So this font is called Blangton Script.
I'll try and find it and add a link to it in the description of this video.
So what Design Space does is adds all these horrible gaps between the letters.
We don't want that because it looks really messy and it's hard to read.
So to get rid of those gaps,
you can click on the layer and then press "Ungroup" at the top of the layers panel.
And now each letter is on its own individual layer,
so you can just click and drag them
to make sure those letters are going to touch.
Not quite sure how that set is supposed to join.
Let's just put it like that.
So I'm just moving these all together
so that they are a lot closer, which is how the font is supposed to be.
So I'm just going to group them all again when I'm happy with how it's looking.
And I think it needs to be a bit bigger
and then I can put that in the middle here.
So now that I've got all my letters,
I'm going to go down the bottom and weld them.
And this is important because if you don't
do that, it'll still cut them all out in separate parts and we want it to be one.
So there we go.
If when you weld, it fills in the middle of the letters.
Sometimes it fills in like the middle of the E, for example, that undo the weld.
By pressing the undo button in the top,
zoom out, select all of your letters
and make your word really big and then press weld again.
And this time it shouldn't fill in the middle.
So if you're having that problem, that's an easy way to fix it.
And then you can just make it smaller
again to fit in the middle of your pumpkin.
OK, so I want to make sure this is exactly in the middle.
So I'm going to choose both layers into "Align" and "Center horizontally".
And now that word, Elizabeth, is perfectly aligned in my pumpkin.
So I'm going to change the color of this to a green.
And then I think I want my stalk of my pumpkin to be green as well.
So to do that, go into the pumpkin.
So click on your pumpkin layer and then
right-click on it and press duplicate to make a copy.
I want these to be perfectly aligned.
So choose both pumpkin layers and go
into "Align" and then "center" and it will put one exactly on top of the other one.
I'm going to change this top one to green
and then I can click on it, go into "Contour" on the bottom right
and click on the bits that I want to remain orange.
And now when I close out of there,
you can see I've got a green stalk, but the pumpkin is orange.
I've not quite finished yet because if I
hide that layer, you can see the orange still has the stalk.
So click onto the orange layer, go into "Contour" and click to remove
the stalk and then don't forget to turn that stalk layer back home.
So there you go.
That was a really quick and easy way to make your own split picture monograms
with names through the middle. So you can do this with any image.
It does not have to be a pumpkin.
You could do whatever you want and you can
put whatever name you want in there to say.
For example, you could put in a surname if
you are making perhaps a door sign or something like that.
I hope you've enjoyed this Design Space tutorial.
If you have, please give it a thumbs up
and subscribe to my YouTube channel for loads more Cricut craft tutorials.
I'm doing a new craft project every day for the whole of October,
so be sure to check that out for loads more Halloween crafts.
Thank you for watching.