Pop ups with Cricut Design Studio

I am predominantly a Mac user, so I don’t mess with Cricut Design Studio much, but I thought I would try out the pop up card technique so those without SCAL can play along. Here were the results:

and here’s a screen shot (colors are reversed…the outside of the card is on the right):

You can download the .cut file here. Cartridge is Plantin Schoolbook. The finished card is A2 size so you can just use a half sheet of card stock for the outside instead of cutting one with the Cricut as I did above. For instructions on how to assemble the card, check the references on my earlier post about pop ups.

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.