Hello and welcome to craft with Sarah. In this Design Space tutorial I'm going
to show you how you can create a shape out of words in Cricut Design Space. This is
really nice for creating personalized designs. For example I've done one that says family and
I've got words from the edge like loving, caring and special. You could easily do it with names
of your family members, names for your children or grandchildren, pets or your friends so that you've
made something really, really unique and special and personal to you or for one of your family
members that you decide to give this to as a gift. It would make lovely t-shirts or tote bags.
Let's go ahead and jump into Design Space and get started on creating our shape out
of words. We're going to start by making the shape that we want and you might be able to
find it in shapes if you're doing a basic shape. If you're doing something that isn't in there
then you can look in images and try and search for it and find something in there.
For this I'm going to do a heart so I can just use the basic heart that is in Design Space.
I'm going to make it nice and big so it's easier to work with and then just change the colour to
white. I can just see the outline around the edge and the next thing to do is to
choose the words you want to go big along the middle so go into text and type out your word.
To change the font highlight the text and then go into the font drop down, here you can choose from
the fonts on your computer or the Cricut ones. To filter only by your fonts you can click system
and scroll through them all or if you know which one you want to use you can type it in the search
box. I'm going to use a font called angel heart so I click on that and it changes to it
but you'll notice all the letters are spread apart and this is something that Design Space does
when you use a script font. It is really annoying because it means you have to go and put them all
next to each other but luckily it's fairly quick and easy to do. I'll show you how to do that
in the layers panel, right click on the word and press Ungroup and this moves every single letter
to its own layer so now we can just click and drag each one
to get them to connect. when you're happy with how it's looking select all the layers by clicking
one and then pressing control on your keyboard and clicking the other ones in the layers panel
and then press Weld and now that's joined them all together again as one layer.
Sometimes when you Weld you might notice that it fills in some of the holes in your letters.
If it does that a quick way to fix it is to click the undo button on the top left to undo the Weld
and then select all your letters and make them really big by using the arrow on the bottom.
Then when it's really big Weld it again and that seems to fix it and then you can make
it smaller again after you've Welded it and it will keep the text looking how it should. Now
I've got my word I can position it in the middle of the heart where I want it to go.
I want to make it quite large and have it going across the middle and then I'm going to
put my words around the edge so I need to start on those words. I'm going to go back to my text and
start typing them in and once again it's made all of the letters separate but unfortunately
we can't do the same fix with words that were going to curve around the shape because once
you Ungroup the letters then Design Space doesn't let you curve it any more. We need to do things
a little bit differently so with your new word selected go into letter space and type zero and
press enter and that's moved them a lot closer but they're still not quite touching. Click the box
a few times until the majority of the letters are touching and if there are some that are still
separate, for example, this g then don't worry about that for now, we'll fix it right at the end.
We can't fix it until we've got this into position on our heart
so with the letters almost right go into curve and just do a slight curve
of the text and make it smaller and then position it over the heart. You can use the rotate
little icon to change the angle and if you need to go back into curve and change the curve line
so that it goes around the line that you can see on the heart.
The closer you can match it to the line the better it'll look when it's all finished.
It takes a little bit of trial and error and you might notice when you're curving it
that your letters get far apart again and not touching. On this one my v and my eye
aren't touching any more and again we'll fix that right at the end but we can't fix it now
because otherwise we can't change the curve. I'm going to do the next one and you can right
click on an existing word and press duplicate and then double click into it to change the text.
This has saved the letter spacing and they're still fairly close and that's okay
but I need to change the curve so that it's not quite so obvious so it will fit on the heart.
You might find when you add in another word that shows the first one is too big and we can just
make it a little bit smaller and then position it back on the heart. I think it looks better if
all of your words around the edge of the shape are the same font size so whilst you're going
around and fixing things just make sure that all of your words are selected when you're resizing
apart from the big one in the middle because that gives you a nicer more uniform effect overall
if they're all the same. I'm happy with how that's looking so far and if you want to
check at any point you can just click the eye icon next to your heart in the layers panel
so that you can see how those words are looking when you don't have your guideline in place.
I'm going to move on to the next word so duplicate one of the existing ones
that the font size is the same and then you can type in your next word.
My Design Space is being very slow today which is quite annoying.
This one is nearly alright as it is actually just a little curved change
and move the rotation and there we are. The next one is if you're not too hot on
your spelling or if you tend to make a lot of typos then one thing you can do is type the
words into Microsoft word or some other Word Press processor, maybe pages if you're on a mac, then
it will spell check it for you so you can then copy and paste it into Design Space. That is a
nice way to make sure that you've got all of your words spelt correctly. I've got a little gap here,
I want a nice little word for that. Sometimes when you do it your letters might be really far apart
and you can just go down on the letter space for that particular one to move them a bit closer
but again don't worry too much if they don't all completely match because we'll fix it at the end.
I am going to rotate the word family a little bit as I think that'll fit better with how I've done
it and there we go. That's the top half done and if I hide the outline you can see it is starting
to look like a heart but the layer needs to come in a little bit. That's starting to look good and
now we can do the bottom half and it's exactly the same again. Duplicate the existing words and I'm
actually not going to use that one because I changed the letter space so let's do that one.
This time you need to drag your curve the other side if you're doing a heart because
the curve of the heart goes the other way and I'm going to use a nice big word
to go down the bottom and then I'll just need to move the hat and one more for the other side.
For this one because it's not quite going to fit I will just make it a tiny bit smaller.
If I hide the heart now you can see you've got all your words in that heart shape and your main text
as well. I'm happy with that and I'm just going to go ahead and save it so that I don't lose any of
that work. Now you can go in and change any text that isn't quite touching as it should be. It
can be helpful to zoom in so you can see it better and on this loving the v and the I aren't touching
and the I and the n. We're going to do what we did to start with, we're going to Ungroup it
and then change the letters by clicking and dragging so that they touch how you want them to.
Bear in mind once you've done this once and you've split them up so you can't
change the text any more so you can't edit the curve and you can't change the wording.
Only do this when you're basically happy with how it's all looking.
That did the Welding thing I was telling you about earlier,
it's filled in that o so if I just undo that one and make it all really big and
I just group all those together and make it really big and press Weld again.
It's still done it and it's still filling in those gaps. Even when it's really big just undo it again
and the letters that are causing the problem. Mine is the l and the o so just move one of them
slightly further away and that should fix it. I'm going to move that l a little bit away from the o
and now try again. There we go, that fixed it. That's a couple of different things you can try
if it is filling it in. When you Weld first make it bigger and the second is if it still does
it after you've made it bigger then try moving some of the letters a little bit further away.
It is a little bit annoying because obviously we now have to change the size as we made it bigger
and then smaller. We can't guarantee any more that it's exactly the same size as the other words
but if you click and drag you can kind of eyeball it and get it fairly close. Now I'm
just going to go ahead and do the same thing for all the other words and then I'll jump
back in and show you how to finish it off. I've now sorted out all my words where the
letters are touching and where I want them to be and then I've repositioned them around the heart
so that it's beginning to look a lot more like a proper heart shape. There's one more thing to do
which will help the eye to see the shape a little bit easier and that's to add a little picture in
between each of the words. Not only does this help fill in the shape that little bit easier
but it distinguishes where one word ends and the next begins which again makes it easier to read.
I'm going to go into shapes and choose another heart and
I'm going to make it black to match my text colour and then make it quite small. I'm just going to
put a little heart in between the words and rotate it so that it's kind of filling the shape of the
heart in its rotation. This isn't touching the words it's just sitting in between them
and I'm going to make sure the heart's always the same size for consistency which might mean
that some of the words have to go down a tiny bit to give you the right amount of space.
Once you've started adding these in you'll see that it really does help
your shape come to life and pop off the screen a little bit more.
I've got a couple left to do and if you move something accidentally you can just hit the
undo button and then make sure you've got the right layer selected to move things.
I just need one more down the bottom and
I'm actually going to make that one a little bit bigger because it's got quite a big gap down here
and it's finishing off the bottom of the heart so it can afford to be
bigger than the ones at the top. Let's move that around and there we have it,
our finished heart of words and now it's nearly ready to cut. If I was to choose make it now
you can see it's put all the words in random shapes and it's actually a little bit hard
to see because it's got the black background. It hasn't kept the shape of the heart so to make it
keep the shape click and drag your mouse around everything to select all the layers
and then press the Attach button and now that means when we go to make it. That'll be the same
but it also means you can click and drag and it will resize the whole thing in proportion
so you can make it the size that you want. To cut it let's say eight inches wide
and then if you want to you can change the colour.
Now when you go to make it you see it's kept it all in the correct positioning
so that it's ready for us to go ahead and cut. I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial on how to make
a shape out of words and if you have please give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to
my You Tube channel for loads more Design Space and Cricut tutorials . Thank you for watching .