Hello and welcome to Craft with Sarah. In this video I'm going to show you how
you can perfectly size layered SVG files
in Cricut Design Space to ensure they fit in your frame exactly as you want them to.
I'm going to show you two different ways to size the designs depending on what you want
to go in the frame. The first example will be the fairy design and on this one we've just got one
solid sheet of card in the background and then for the second part of the video I'll show
you how I did this ballet frame where it's got the mats and layers in the background.
I'll also show you my number one hack for making sure that your design will fit perfectly
every time without wasting any of your craft materials. Let's get started.
We're going to start with when you want to put something in a frame where the background is
just going to be one solid color, so either a white piece of card or just a matching
card color or pattern that will match your layered design. Here is my box frame. It's
from Hobbycraft which is a craft store in the UK. I'm going to turn it over
and then peel up all of these little tabs so I can take out the back of the frame.
Some of them are being a little bit stubborn. Okay, so now I can take out the back
and then inside I've got a piece of paper which is just the little branding thing.
With these deep shadow boxes, you've normally got a spacer inside them. This is the part that we're
going to measure. You could also measure the piece of paper that comes in it if you've got that,
but if you're using an older frame then you might have thrown this piece of paper away
which is why I'm going to show you how to do it on the spacer. Let's put all this to one side,
bring in the spacer and you want to measure it from one side (so all the way along the edge)
all the way across until the other far edge of the wood.
Here's my ruler. I'm going to do it in inches and if you line your ruler up along the bottom
then you can be sure you are doing it straight. Mine comes to just about8.5
inches. It's actually just a little bit under but I think 8.5 will be fine.
Now I know that this full size is 8.5 I can start
thinking about how big I'd want my design in the middle.
I'm just going to place my ruler sort of in the hole
and just sort of play about with where I want it to go.
I want this design to fill the space quite well, so from looking at this I think about
6.5 would be a good size and then that will fit nicely inside my 8.5 inches.
Bear in mind also that you will lose this little edge - you won't be able to see
whatever is over that a- nd you'll probably won't be able to see the very closest bits
to that spacer when you're looking at your frame from the front because normally how
they work is that the front of the frame sort of overlaps the spacer a bit so it isn't seen.
So just bear that in mind when sizing it you don't want to go
sort of really close. I probably wouldn't want to do 7.5 inches because you might
not see those very edges of the design when you put it in, but 6.5 looks like a good amount.
I'm going to load my design into Design Space set it to 6.5 inches in width and then I'll show
you my super trick for making sure you're happy with the size before you've cut everything out.
Here's the fairy design loaded into Design Space. If you want to get this file,
it's a free download from my website so head to craftwithsarah.com/free-svgs/ to find it.
Now as we know we just measured it to be 6.5 inches, that's the size we want to make the design
so I'm going to click on it and then in the width and height box at the top
make sure the padlock is closed and then I'm going to change the width to 6.5.
The height has changed in proportion too so although it's 6.3 that is fine we actually
want it to change in proportion so we don't want it to be the same width and height because that
would end up stretching or squishing the design so it wouldn't look right anymore.
It is probably a good idea to mention that if your design was very sort of narrow and tall
then you might want to measure the height rather than the width otherwise if you put
your width to 6.5 you'd probably find that your height would be bigger than your box.
For square or landscape designs it works great to measure the width.
If it's more of a portrait style design then measure the height.
Now I could go ahead and cut all of this but what happens if I've measured wrong?
What if this is too small or too big? I don't want to have to cut everything out and then
end up having to do it again because that would take ages and it would be a waste of materials.
There is one special little hack which you can do to check your design before cutting everything out
and that is just to cut the bottom layer.
So what I'm going to do over in the layers panel is click the eye icon next to all of the layers
that I don't want to cut right now and this just turns them off. They're still there,
they still exist, I'm just hiding them for the moment. I'm going to go through all of these and
there are a lot on this fairy design. Most designs don't have so many and then I'm going to leave
on the very bottom and then click 'Make It' and go ahead and cut just this out .
I'm not actually going to cut it out from green. So what you can do at this point,
because this is just a test, is you could cut it from any kind of scrap card you've got
or even printer paper or just whatever kind of card that you've got a lot of.
Don't waste your precious materials doing a test cut! We're gonna just do this, cut this one layer,
and then see how it looks in the shadow box to see if we're happy with the size
and if not then we can resize it and try again and we haven't wasted anything.
Now that I've got my very bottom layer cut out I can just place it inside my spacer
and make sure I'm happy with that size.
At this point you might think it's too big or too small and if it is then just go back into
Design Space, cancel out of the cut and resize the design to however big you think it should be
and then do a test cut again of the bottom layer.
For mine, I was fairly confident that the size was going to be right because I've done this
lots of times before so I did cut it out of the green card I actually want to use,
but if you're new to sizing things to go in shadow boxes then I would recommend using just a piece
of paper or scrap card or, I don't know, a card you've got loads and loads of that color
so you're not wasting any sort of precious card that you don't have much of
on your test cut, just in case you need to do it again.
All right, so now you're happy with the design you can go ahead and I'll show you in Design
Space how to turn the rest of the layers back on so that you can continue cutting everything else.
As I'm happy with the size of the design, I now need to turn all of my layers back on so that I
can cut them out and this is just as simple as clicking the eye icons in the layers panel go
through all of them and all of the ones that you turned off make sure you turn them back on again
I'm just going down clicking all of these eyes
and now they're all back on again. Have a little look to make sure it's looking right,
because you might find that you've accidentally missed one but now this is all ready I can cut
it out from the correct colors and I know that it's going to fit perfectly inside my shadow box.
Here is my second way of resizing designs to make sure they fit in your shadow box and this
time it's for if you want to have extra layers of paper or card in the background
to make some sort of pattern or design or kind of have mats and layers behind the design.
When you've got that, you just need to bear in mind that they're going to take up extra space
in the frame so when you're measuring you need to make sure you're measuring the right thing.
Here's the shadow box I'm going to use for my ballerina layered design
and for this I have already cut three squares which I'm going to use for the backing.
I didn't use my Cricut machine to do thism I just used my paper trimmerm
but first what I did to get the size for the biggest piece is exactly what we did before.
Here's my frame and I just took the spacer out, measured from one side to
the other - just realized I'm not actually in the shot I'm running out of space -
so this one was 9. and then a silly amount so I think I actually did it in centimeters.
My paper trimmer has centimeters on it as well so centimeters this comes to just about 25.
It's a little bit under, so that's what I used 25 centimeters square for the biggest sheet of paper.
That was this one and I wanted to make sure that you could see
quite a few of these ballerinas around the edge so I also did two more squares
and for this I just kind of guessed on my paper trimmer how big I'd want them to be.
So there they are, the white square is just a quarter of an inch smaller than the pink
one so it gives that nice pink border and I like this because it's got enough of the
space around the edge that you can really see all the ballerinas on the background.
Now that you have your background papers done it's much easier to then think about how you're
going to resize the layered design. Because now I know that it has to fit inside this white square.
If I'd resized the ballerina first and cut it out and stuck it together
and then done the squares here I'd have to make the squares fit the layered design and that would
have been more difficult because if I'd have made the layer design too big then I'd have had to make
my squares bigger so you wouldn't be able to see the ballet dancers around the edge of the paper.
All right, so how to do it, well it's very easy - just like we kind of did on the first go.
We're just going to place the ruler and just see how big we want it to go.
I want the ballet dancer to come fairly near the edge of the white but with a nice white border
still around the sides so I think 6.5 inches will be the perfect width for my ballerina.
Now I'm not going to show you all the Design Space steps again because it's exactly the same
and what I have done is I have cut out this bottom layer just to show you. Again,
I've already done it in the color I'm going to cut it from so this is. It's going to be a skin layer.
So you might want to do it as I said with the other one, in a piece of scrap paper or
printer paper or something first so you can see that's going to fit really nicely in that square.
Because this is quite a long design - it isn't very tall - it's going to
leave me some space at the bottom to add the name of the person this is going to.
Now I'm happy with the size of this I can cut out the rest of the layers and then when
I am done I will show you how to stick all of this together to actually go into the frame.
Here's how all of my frame layers are looking now that the ballerina is cut out
and assembled. To find out how to do this, I have a whole separate video so you can check
it out in the description of this one to see how to put the ballet dancer together.
Now it's time to stick these layers and I'm going to start by putting the white on top of the pink.
I'm going to use glue for this because it will give me a bit of wiggle room when I inevitably
don't stick it straight because I'm terrible at that, but you could also use double-sided tape.
I'm just gonna add my glue and this glue is fantastic because it doesn't bend or warp the card
like some glue can do. Even if you put loads on, it just doesn't seem to affect the card at all and
this glue is called Collall. I get it on Amazon and I'll add a link in the description to show you
where to find it, and then I've just put it into this teeny tiny bottle which makes things easier.
All right, moment of truth, can I stick this straight?
I'm gonna pick it up a bit so you won't be able to see very well for
a while but it's just a little bit easier for me to see what I'm doing.
Okay I think I'm happy with that. Let's
push it down and now I can stick this onto my backing paper. Again I'm going to add some glue
all around the edge and also lots in the middle because we don't want this to come away from that
backing paper when it's in the frame and it's got all the weight of that ballet dancer sort
of on top of it. We don't want that to pull this away from that base card. So again I'm gonna try
and stick this in the middle. It's the thing I'm absolutely the worst at when it comes to crafting
so I'm going to pick this up - sorry you can't see!
I've not quite got that straight... move it about a bit... okay i think that's straight.
I'll probably look at it in a minute when I'm not sat at this desk and be like "oh no that's
not straight at all". Okay, so now the ballet dancer is ready to be added and I could just put
it in the middle and it will look really nice or because there's quite a lot of space if she goes
closer to the top, I'm actually going to add the name of the little girl under the bottom.
I'm not going to show you how to do that because I've got it in another video
which is my dog frame video using my mandala dogs.
Again, I'll drop the link to that in the description if you want to see that.
We're just going to pretend I've already added the name there and I will just stick this on the top
so let's add glue. I want to make sure there's a lot of glue on here so this has a really
really good stick I do not want it falling off.
This glue is actually really quite good at sticking. That sounds silly, but you know
some glues they're just not that sticky - this one is! That probably didn't make any sense.
I'm just going to position my little ballerina near the top so I've got room to add that name,
make sure she's in the middle kind of horizontally, there we go. I'm just
gonna push down gently as I do not want to smush any of that glue outside of the card.
But now that's on there I'm gonna wait for it to dry for a couple
of minutes and then I'll show you what it looks like in the frame.
I hope you enjoyed this video on how to perfectly resize your layered SVGs
to fit inside your shadow boxes or photo frames.
If you did, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my YouTube channel for
loads more Cricut card making and papercraft tutorials. Thank you so much for watching, bye!