I’ll warn you, this post will be longer than usual so grab a frosty cold beverage and get comfy. As you know I love using my Sure Cuts A lot software (SCAL) with my Cricut. I just learned how to design my own files that I can cut with SCAL and my Cricut using a free program called Inkscape. I love the look of artisan shapes and thought “I’d like to have a cool bracket frame”, well it was super easy to make in SCAL by welding 4 parenthesis brackets together (you could do it in Design Studio as well for that matter) but I also would like to share the file with others so they can resize it however they want so I make one in Inkscape and saved it as a SVG file so you can use it with SCAL and a Cricut and hopefully other die cutting machines. If you are scrappin it old school you can download Inkscape, resize the shape how you want it, print journaling in it if desired, print it on the paper of your choice, cut it out and put it on your card or layout. Easy Peasy! Here is a layout I did using my bracket frame, I glittered the frame and placed it over a pic of me and my daughters and I used the middle of the frame as my journaling block. I stamped some swirls around the edges using the large stamp in Inque Boutique’s Storyboard set. I love how you get 2 shapes from one die cut (3 if you use the negative space around the frame!)
Then I decided a shaped card would be pretty so I imported my shape into SCAL and made it fill half the mat (I am using the original 6″x12″ Cricut) and clicked “weld” then I copy and pasted the shape again (to make sure bot halves of my card would be the same size) then I flipped my second shape (to keep the card symmetrical) clicked weld and overlapped the two shapes on the edges. That’s also how I made the scallop card with the glitter in it.
Click here for the SVG file. I hope you enjoy it. If you have any trouble please leave me a comment and I’ll try to help you. If you want to download Inkscape click here. If you don’t have SCAL you can get it here, it’s $70 but you can download a 10 free trial to see if you like it. The trial version will cut horozontal lines through your design as a watermark but you can see how well it works before you buy.
I also cut all of the flourishes, swirls and title in SCAL. Fonts used were all freebies: Victorian LET, Designs Galore and KR Swash Buckler.
Thanks for reading through this long post! Have a great weekend!
