The Great Divide Part 2

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:

  1. The circle divide can be used to create citrus slices
  2. I could have made the task a lot easier by using the Layout>Array function! (Duh me!)

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:


The Great Divide

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. 🙂

Dividing a Circle into Segments

Handy Circle Tip

Before I get into today’s tip, I wanted to let you all know that I will be gone to Texas to teach cutting classes for the rest of the week, so I may not get a chance to post! Hopefully, I will find a few minutes to post something new, but if not, then know that new tips and tidbits will appear again next week! 🙂

Okay, todays’ lesson: When auto-tracing images, you will often find that circles end up…. well… wonky! lol Here is a fish image that I traced from a free pdf file I found at the Coloring Page link at the bottom of my blog:

You can clearly see that the bubbles and the eye of the fish are NOT very desirable circles.

Well, in KNK Studio, there is a QUICK way to convert any path to a circle. First, select the image and go to Arrange>Break Path so that the individual paths can be selected.

Double click on one of the circles to bring up the nodes:
Now… are you ready… this is SO easy you may miss it… Click on the letter “O” on your keyboard. Bingo! The wonky circle vanishes and it’s replaces with a perfect circle!

Now just repeat for each of the remaining circles and your final result will be:

Note that this works in both polyarc and polygon modes. Have fun making your life more round!