Written Tutorial-How to Make A Shapebook in Make The Cut!

I have written another tutorial for using with the Make the Cut software. This tutorial will show you how to make a shapebook like the one pictured above. For ease, I have only created a 6 page book with only using 5 elements. You can create these books with as many pages as you desire that will fit on your mat and with as many elements as you have pages. The pages sizes in this tutorial are used for this demonstration, your pages can also be adjusted to the width and height that you desire.

To download this tutorial click HERE!

If you would like the MTC image used in the book:

For the Picnic Basket click HERE!

For the Sub-sandwich click HERE!

For the Ant click HERE!

For the Watermelon click HERE!

NOTE:!!! After making this tutorial, I left one step out that you will need for using these images in this book, this may not be necessary for any other images used. For the pieces that are welded to the pages, after making your second copy and removing it, using the first copy, break the image and remove all of the pieces except the background piece. This is the piece you will want to "weld" to the book. For some reason with these images, when I tried to weld the pieces the parts that were on the page welded, the parts off of the page did not weld.

Hope this tutorial helps you in creating these books. If you find that I need to elaborate more on a specific part of this tutorial or you are having difficulty with the tutorial, please leave me a comment so that I can help.

Baby Shower ShapeBook

Baby Shower ShapeBook, continued

This new version of MTC has made it so easy to do shapebooks now. With the prior versions you had to have a separate file for each page. With this new version and the layers feature, you can do it all on one page. I have put together this Baby Shower shapebook. For the picture below, I have the "eye" open on all pages to show the effects of the book and the layout of the pages. If you will notice at the bottom of this page are all of the page elements that will be cut.

As you see in the picture above, all of the elements are on top of each other and I know you are wondering how do I cut them. But if you click on the "global eye" at the bottom of the Layers property box, it will close all layers and make them invisible so that your Cricut will not cut them. Then as you begin to do a page, click the "eye" on that layers page and it will only show the items to cut for that page, as shown below in the next picture. So for this picture you can move the pieces around if needed to like colors of cardstock on your real mat. Remember when cutting out shape books you will need to cut a second copy of the page layer for the back of the page.

To cut the back of the page, you will need to place your cardstock face down on the mat and then cut the page layer again. You will not need to cut the elements again. Another option is to "flip" the page layer and then you can place your cardstock face up and cut.

In this file, with the elements being attached to the Page layers, you do not have an option to make just the "elements" invisible, so you will either need to move these to their own layer, or I find it easier to open up a new page in MTC, and then just do a copy of the page layer, click on the new page and do a Paste in Place, then cut using one of the two options above for the back of the page.

The Layer Properties box. I have labeled each "grouping" by Page numbers and within the Pages are the Page Layer itself and the elements for that page.

This shape book would be a great gift to give at a Baby Shower. After cutting the book, you can bind the book; my choice is to use my Bind-It-All, you may have another preference. Then you will want to create other page elements such as tags, mats for pictures, etc.

Some examples to include in the book could be: copy of the shower invitation, guests that attended, presents received, games played, refreshments served, etc.

Hope you like it and find it useful.

If you would like this .mtc file, please click HERE.

My shapebook is almost done...

I have been working on getting this finished for quite sometime now. Just have been really busy and even today trying to get this much done, my 3 granddaughters came up for the weekend. Thanks to my darling hubby, he kept them entertained playing outside for awhile while I worked on this. The only thing left now is to add more embellishments (tags, mats, stickles, ribbon, etc) and the pictures to the inside pages.

My Girl Scout troop (I was the leader for 11 years), went to Europe in 2007 for our last year of scouts. We did a 10 day tour visiting London, Paris and several cities in Switzerland. (The dragon is from the legendary Mt. Pilatus in Switzerland.)

I used the Make the Cut software program to create this shape book and several other images from clipart.

I used my Zutter bind-it-all to bind the book with white 3/4 inch O-wire. I just love this little machine it does a wonderful job in making these books.

I am hoping to have the rest of the embellishments done very soon. I will then share a picture-video of the book to show all of the pages and all of the elements I used.

Again, thanks for looking and check back soon.

Chipboard or Posterboard

I have made a couple of shape books now and the previous shape books were made with brown chipboard that I got from the inserts that are in the boxes that reams of paper comes in. This is the chipboard. It is already sized at 8 1/2 by 11 inches.
I am not quite happy at the results using this kind of chipboard. The edges show sort of a grey shade, which to me looks like an "unfinished" piece of work.

The current book that I am working on, I wanted to try something different. So I bought several packs of this white posterboard at Wal-Mart. It comes in a pack of 5 pre-cut sheets of 11x14 in size. I wasn't sure if this would hold up sturdy enough or not, but decided to give it a try.

The posterboard cut out very nice with the Cricut machine with no problems at all. I then used DCWV cardstock for my layers to attach to the front and back of the posterboard. This cardstock helped make the posterboard thicker. And it is just as sturdy as using the brown chipboard I had used previously. I am now convinced this is the type of material I will use for my shape/word books and was impressed at how "clean" the edges looked.

I definitely would recommend using this posterboard for these projects.

Europe Shape Book

I am still continuing to work on the shape book I have started. Here is the first picture of just the pages cut out of the white poster board (trying this instead of the grey/brown chip board). I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon cutting out the page layers and need to finish a couple of more pages, then once I adhere those will probably show an "update" picture as I progress.

To see how this turns out....check back again soon.