In search of more elegant stencil fonts

You may have noticed that sometimes you want to use the negative space on your Cricut cutouts on a layout, craft or as a stencil for painting, embossing, screen printing, etc. Unfortunately, those pesky little trapped spaces like the triangle in the uppercase A (called counters) cause problems for negative space applications. You may also have noticed that most of the stencil fonts currently available scream military/industrial complex. Recently, I’ve run across a couple of posts that are addressing this problem, as well as giving instructions on how to mod any font you like for stencil use.

Michael Mandino and Patrick Davidson have a stencil version of Zapfino they call Stencilano available for download here.

Denise over at Denise’s Scrapbooking Room has a couple of stencil letter sets in SVG format.

Stencil letters from Denise

Instant font slideshow in Mac OSX (Leopard)

Compared to the PC side, there is a dearth of font viewing software for Macs. In particular, none of the freebies and few of the for-pay font utilities I have found allow you to view uninstalled fonts. However, you can view the character sets for your fonts, whether installed or uninstalled with this Mac OSX Leopard  trick.

Open a finder window and select the fonts you want to view. Here I have filtered my downloaded fonts folder by searching for “ttf” to eliminate most of the folders and read me files. It doesn’t matter what view you are in. I am showing this in the cover flow view, because some of you may not know you can use it for fonts.

Next just tap the space bar (or the QuickView icon which looks like an eye) and your font slide show window will appear. Use the arrow keys to navigate or click on the triangle on the screen to play the slideshow automatically.

The contact sheet button works, too, though it acted a little quirky for me .

This is really a lot of fun to play with. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

3D Text made easy

I ran across a very cool Instructable the other day on making pop-up words, and realized this would be a great project for the Cricut. Alas, the fonts listed in the article do not work on the Cricut. You can adapt this to Cricut cutting with any suitable font by adding tabs one by one in Inkscape, SCAL or maybe even CDS, but… I decided it would be quicker to just make a new font.

To prepare your cutfile in SCAL, choose the pop up font in the library window, set the size and start typing. If you are using Solly PopTab font you can insert scoring guides using the minus key. That is what produces the four rows of dashed lines before and after my text below.

Next add rectangles above and below the text with the edges just overlapping. In my example I used the mat centerline on the screen and aligned it with the centerline of the installed letters (the second dash from the bottom) and then made my rectangles end equidistant from the centerline. I haven’t really experimented with the best ways to size everything yet, you will likely develop your own preferred method.

With everything set to weld, your preview and finished cut will look like this.

I score the bottom line and top 2 lines before removing the paper from the mat so that I can use the dashed lines as guides.

The instructions for assembly are pretty much the same as what you see on Instructables except that there is nothing on the centerline (2nd set of dashes from the bottom) to fold or score because the Cricut cuts out everything between the letters.

For the time being you’ll have to go to Fontstruct to get my pop up font called Solly PopTab. A registration is required. I think you’ll love Fontstruct anyway, but that’s a subject for another post.

By the way, in this font only uppercase letters, numbers and other characters that have the tab on top will work for the pop-ups. You can also insert artwork, just use the font as a guide for where everything goes.

Enjoy, and let me see your creations when you get done!

Update: Solly PopTab font now available at this link.

Cool Word Art site

I love fonts and typography. With the ability to do vinyl wall sayings and tiles, I began to renew my interest in word art. Turns out the digital scrapbookers are pretty into word art, too, so there are some great resources out there.

Now, many of these designs are not suitable for cutting, but they do give you some great ideas about phrases to use, positioning the words in a phrase, etc. One word art site I really like is Elegant Word Art by Bethany. She is very generous with her talent… just look at the long list of freebies in the right hand column. What I really like is that she usually lists the names of the fonts she uses in each design, which makes it easy to recreate the look in Inkscape or SCAL.