Hello and welcome to Craft with Sarah. In this video,
I'm going to show you how you can add your own text or draw layers to greetings cards designs.
We're going to be using an existing greetings card design
and I'm using one from my shop which you can see on the screen now, but you can use any greetings
card you've got either for a larger Cricut machine like the Explore or the Maker series
or one for the Cricut Joy and I'll show you the Cricut Joy tutorial separately in a little while.
Sometimes with greetings cards, they come with a lovely space for you to add your own message.
One of the things I love about the Cricut is that you can have the drawing feature,
so you can stick a pen in there and it will do you a lovely, lovely drawing
and this is especially good if you're like me and you don't have many sentiments or rubber
stamps or anything like that, that you could put in the middle. With the Cricut, it really is
endless possibilities of things you could draw or write to go in the middle, but how do you do that?
I'll show you two different ways. The first will be using images from quick access and the
second will be writing text in a drawing font. To find images which can be drawn,
go into images on the left and then I'm going to untick the uploaded box so that I see all of
the Cricut access images rather than ones I've personally uploaded to Design Space
and then under operation type, I'm going to choose draw only. And once that's loaded,
you then get all of these wonderful pictures as well as some phrases. So you can choose whatever
you like and if you want to, you can even search in here. So let's search for Birthday. See what
comes up and then you could choose any one of these to add to the middle of the card.
I'm not quite sure why I've got all these dinosaurs when
I search for Birthday, but I do kind of like them.
I'm gonna go for this one which says a little Birthday love, so I've clicked on it and press
add to canvas. I can then move this into my design and resize it so it will fit.
If you want to change the colour or the pen type, you can do that in here. So for example, I might
make it red. The Cricut doesn't actually know when you load a colored pen, what you've put in there,
so you could just leave it at black and then choose a colored pen when you actually go to put
it in the Cricut. That's completely up to you. If you're using the Cricut Joy, then make sure
you've got the Joy selected over in this top right bit because that uses different pens, so if you've
got the Joy what you see in this will be different if you've got one of the maker or explore models..
If I was to click make it now, you see it's actually going to do the drawing
on a separate piece of card and not where I want it to go in the middle of my card front.
To get drawing to go where you want it to you need to use the attach button,
however because our card design has come in two separate layers we need to ungroup it.
First press ungroup at the top and then select your drawing layer. Press shift on your keyboard
and choose the card blank and then down the bottom of the layers panel, press attach.
Now you can see it says the word attach up here and when we click make it,
that draw layer appears exactly in the middle of our card which is just what we want. So that's
how to add a draw layer using a draw image, but what if the image you want isn't actually a draw
one but it's a cut one. We can change it so that we can draw it instead and here's how.
I've gone back to the original version of my card and now I'll go into images again
and this time, I'll choose cut only rather than draw. I'll keep that Birthday selected
and then what you're looking for really is something that is quite simple and only one
or two colours because we're going to be drawing around the outside of it.
I quite like this one so let's press add to canvas. This has come in as two separate colours
which you can tell because it's two different layers. That's okay because it means we can
use two separate colored pens on this, but if you didn't want it to be two colours, then you
can join the layers together by clicking weld at the bottom of the screen and now that's just all
one colour. However, I'll undo that so I can show you how to do it with the two different colours.
Drag it over to your card and resize it. I want to make sure this is exactly in the middle so
I'm going to drag a box around everything and then go align, center horizontally
and it's just moved that it's your day image right into the middle so now it will look perfect.
To turn this into a draw image, click on one of the layers of the design in the layers panel
and then under the operation drop down, change it to pen. And then you can change the colour
just like we did before. I need to do the same for the other layer, so let's change this to pen
and then I'll leave that one as black. So you can see if I zoom in,
this is going to require two separate pen colours
and then if you wanted to fill in the middle, you could always just colour it in afterwards.
We need to attach everything again, so I've already got my card ungrouped, but if you
didn't, if it was still in a group, you'd need to ungroup it just like we did before.
I’m going to select my base layer. Press shift on the keyboard and choose the group that contains my
two pen layers and then press attach. Let's double check but when I click make it you see there
it is and we're going to load in the two colours of pens and then it will do all of the cutting.
If you want to add a score line to the middle of the card to make it easier to fold
then check out my other videos because I've got one on there on how to add score lines.
The final way you can add text to the middle of your card is actually by using the text tool.
So rather than trying to find something that says exactly what you want it to say
in the images section, you can just type it out instead.
Go into text and then type out what you want to add, so I'm going to go for Happy Birthday.
I'm going to center this just so it looks a bit neater and then resize it to fit.
You can then change the font in here and again there are two ways you can do this. You can either
choose any font for example, this one and then change it to a draw font by going into operation
and then pen, but what that's going to do is it will draw around the edge of the font so you end
up with these bubble letters. Depending on what you're making that might be absolutely fine,
but if you prefer it just to be a single line so it looks more like you've actually written those
words out then we need to choose a different font. So let's undo that and go back into our fonts
and then under the filters on the top right, change it to writing and this will update to
only show you specific fonts that have been designed to be written with a pen.
If I choose this one which is called Alyssa Stencil Script. You see now, it just has that
single line so the Cricut will just draw and it will look exactly like pretty handwriting.
Let's make it a little bit smaller and just like before, I'm going to align it,
center horizontally to put that in the middle and then we need to attach it. My card layers are
grouped so ungroup them and then choose the draw layer and the card underneath and press attach.
Click make it and you can see it's going to do that drawing right in the middle of the card.
So there you go. That is lots of different ways on how you can add drawing effects to
your greetings cards in Cricut Design Space but what if you're making a Cricut Joy, insert card.
I'll show you how to do that now. Here's one of the Cricut Joy insert cards from my SVG shop.
I'll drop the link in the description in case you're interested in getting this design.
My Cricut Joy templates come with the insert little piece underneath, if you need to cut that,
but if you're using the pre-made cricut insert cards, they already come with that pretty insert
bit that you thread through the corners so we won't need that, so I'll delete it.
This would be the front of our card and I'm just going to change my selection to the Cricut Joy
and just show you, so when you click make it you choose on card mat and continue and then this
would cut from your card. I want to add some text in the middle here, so just click cancel
and let's change the colour of this to something a bit lighter, so it's easier to see. You can
use exactly the same techniques that we've done throughout this whole video in the middle of here.
I'll show you with the written text, so let's go with and then make that smaller.
Put that there and because I've changed my machine type to the Cricut Joy, I've actually got
different colours come up in here than I would have done before. If you see an exclamation
mark next to your text layer with the Cricut Joy selected, that means that it's selected a
pen that isn't compatible with the Cricut Joy. To fix that, simply click on the text layer,
go into the colour box and choose a colour which will work with the Joy so that will be anything
that appears in that drop down, once you've changed your machine selection to be the Joy.
I'm going to do the word love underneath and do this in a different font just to show that you
can combine things if you want to. Let's try that one and this has come in as a basic cut so let's
change it to a pen layer and this time, it's going to outline the letters, but that's okay.
I'll put that there and I'll keep it in that other colour.
I think it would be nice to have a couple of little hearts drawn around this too
so I'll go into shapes and choose a heart.
Just like we did with the images, we can convert these shapes into draw layers by changing it
to pen and then let's go for cactus pink. A nice light colour
make that smaller. I moved that by mistake. Let's just undo it.
There I'm gonna add a couple more by duplicating the layers.
Make this one a bit smaller and have it facing the other way.
And there we go, that would then fill in the middle of that card. But just like before,
we need to attach it because if we don't and we click make it and I'll choose on card map,
you see it's going to try and do each single pen layer on a different card, which is just
ridiculous. So to fix that, drag a box around everything or you can press select all and then
press attach. That magical attach button tells the Cricut to do all of this on the same card,
so now when you click make it, choose on card mat and continue everything is going to appear on that
same card and then this will be all ready to cut with the Cricut insert cards on our Cricut Joy mat
I hope you've enjoyed this super quick video on how you can add drawing to the
fronts of greetings cards in Cricut Design Space.
If you'd like to learn more about drawing on cards for example, perhaps how to address envelopes or
how to write the inside of cards on a Cricut machine, leave me a comment and let me know
that that's something you'd be interested in and then I can look at it for a future video.
Thank you so much for watching and I hope to see you again soon! Bye.