Thanks to Margaret for today’s idea. She posted to the Klic-N-Kut Yahoo group with a welding issue. She wanted to weld a partial outline of flowers to a flower pot for the purpose of creating a shaped greeting card. The problem is that you cannot weld unclosed objects. In Margaret’s project, by turning on Fill, you can see that the top part is not closed and bottom part is closed:

In general, when you need to do a basic weld on two objects and either or both are not closed, it’s easy to get them closed. If the path you need to close is continuous, then just select the image and go to Arrange>Close Graphics. Or, if the path is not continuous, then you can try Arrange>Connect Path and enter a fairly large value (try 1) and all gaps will close… hopefully… although, you may find that the wrong ends get joined together diagonally across your image!

In today’s video,

Flower Pot Design

I show another way to connect the two ends of a gap. Just select the end nodes and use the middle top icon to connect the ends with a straight line. Then you can proceed with the rest of the weld.

For those interested in designing shaped greeting cards, watch the entire video to see how easy it is to use the Flip and Weld technique to create perfect symmetry and even a dashed fold line, if desired.