I’ ve had a couple of customers email me about the last post in which I recommended using Layout Array to fill the wedge into a circle formation (which was Carol’s terrific idea!). Anyhow, these customers were having problems getting it to work just right, so I created a Part 2 video showing just this part. Hope this answers your questions. 🙂
What I thought was a somewhat trivial blog post yesterday became far more interesting after receiving some member input from the Yahoo groups. Two things came to light:
So, here’s Part 2… no video, but if you watched yesterday’s video, just stop after you create the first wedge and rotate it manually until it’s in a vertical position like this:
Next, go to Layout>Array and select On Arc With Rotation from the drop down menu on the Smart Bar. Set your Start and End at 0 and 360. Don’t worry about the next setting (Arc Radius) quite yet. Just start clicking on Total and then you can go back and increase or decrease Arc Radius so that the wedges are spaced exactly the way you want. When you’re happy with the look, click on Close and then delete the original wedge in the middle:
Now, let’s make it look more like an orange slice. Select the wedges and color them orange. Then go to Transform>Round Corner and play with the setting until you achieve the amount of roundness on the corners that will make it look more like a real orange:
Lastly, just add a yellow circle to the back and another orange circle to the back. If you’re not familiar with the ordering hot keys: Ctrl-L moves an image back one position and Ctrl-B moves it to the very back; Ctrl-U moves an image forward one position and Ctrl-F moves it to the very front. And here’s the final product:
A while back, at one of the many cutter Yahoo groups I scan and read, a member asked how to divide a circle into 7 equal segments (or maybe it was 5?) in “this other cutting software program.” The response to her question was that there wasn’t an easy to do that and just eye-balling it would be the only way. That immediately made me think about whether there was an easy way to do it in KNK Studio… basicially, how do you create the following image:
Well, being a fan of anything mathematical, I had to see if I could figure it out and within a few minutes I had one method… then after thinking about it for awhile, I came up with an easier method. In today’s video I show how to create a circle segment that would represent 1/7 of a whole circle and also how to create the other six and align them to form the above look. Of course, that might not be necessary if you were cutting them from individual colors like the above figure suggests. On the other hand, just in case you do need them properly rotated and arranged, I show that in the video. I failed to show how to recolor each segment, but I’m guessing you can figure out that part on your own. 🙂
As always, let me know if you have any questions!
Kelly D emailed me about tracing stamps so that you could cut out the shapes and then stamp right on the cutouts. She sells Close To My Heart stamps and wanted some tips. Fortunately, I’ve participated in a few CTMH hostess clubs and already had a number of their stamp sets. So, I pulled them out and selected one of my favorites: Flutter.
Next, in KNK Studio, I imported this scan and was careful to just left click once on the Sign Blank, rather than drag the cursor to the desired size. This will ensure the original sizes of the stamps are maintained. I then used the standard Accuscan method to auto-trace the image. I picked Logo-Long Lines and Curves as the default settings. After scanning and moving the vectorized image to the left of the original, the results were:
I then deleted the original, used Arrange>Break Path on the tracing, and began to delete the extra detail not needed. What I wanted were just the overall exterior details of these insects:
Also, you’ll see the tiny little interiors on three of the insects. I kept them on the two larger insects but deleted them on the butterfly. Again, you just use Arrange>Break Path to separate the detail and then you can go in and delete those little paths. 
If any of you already own the CTMH Flutter stamp set, contact me at sandy@iloveknk.com and I will provide you the .knk file I created.
