A Special Guest for today's Tuesday Tips

Thanks to those of you who left tips on my last Tuesday Tips post All About DIGIS.  I got some really good suggestions on storing, printing and using them.  What I didn’t get was anything on coloring them, so that will be next week’s topic.  I’m especially interested in what everyone has to say about Copics.   (That’s become my latest obsession.)   For today’s tips though I have a special guest,

Shawn M. from Cricut Search 
and her personal blog Crafty Chics.

Shawn & her dear sweet family are the angels who have given us the Cricut Search website.  I cannot imagine how many, many hours they have poured into developing and updating this site, and I cannot tell you how much I have come to rely on this site either.  If you use Design Studio or even the Gypsy to search for a particular image you want to cut, you may get some suggestions and you may not (the results are very limited and can be rather slow and incomplete.)  Cricut Search is so much more in depth, complete and just all around easier to use in my opinion. 

I’m very curious about how many of you take advantage of this wonderful resource.  Do you use Cricut Search?  If not, what do you use the most when searching for something in particular?  If you’ve never used Cricut Search I highly recommend you give it a try, in fact here’s a simple little homework assignment.  Search for an image of a leaf.   Search on Cricut Search and then search using whatever alternate method you normally use, then tell me what you think.

One more thing before I turn this over to Shawn.  She & Melissa from Disney Dreamer Designs will be hosting their 2^nd Disney /Pixar Blog Hop this weekend, Saturday, April 30^th and Sunday, May 1^st and just wait till you see who’s in this hop and the amazing prizes being offered!  (I’ve already spilled the beans about a Gypsy being just one of the prizes. )  There will be 10 stops on Saturday and 10 on Sunday which makes it a very easy hop.  The big “Wedding Day” will be over, so plan to come join in the fun 
and now Heeeerrrrrreeee'sss Shawn.......................

As many of you know, my family created the website CricutSearch.com which allows you to search for images that are on the Cricut Cartridges and preview those images so that you can easily find the perfect cut for your project.

I have gotten a couple of emails over the past few weeks with people asking questions about using CricutSearch, so I am going to try to answer questions as well as give you tips on ways to use the site that you might not have even known about.

Question:  I like to make boxes and tags with my Cricut . . . can you tell me which cartridges have cuts for boxes or tags?  I tried typing boxes and tags into Cricut Search but did not get the results that I thought I would.

Answer:  Yes, you can search for cuts of boxes and tags on Cricut Search, but you need to remember that everything is tagged for the singular version of a word.  So, to find the cartridges that have cuts for boxes and tags, you would need to type the word box or tag into the search bar.

If you have a question about Cricut Search or ways you can use it, let us know and maybe we will use your question in one of our Search Tips posts.

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Search by Handbook (video)

Here is another one of the videos that we did for CricutSearch.com that show a search tip on how to search by the name of a Cricut Cartridge.



CricutSearch.com - The crafting tool that gives you time to craft.

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I can't see the images in the handbook

Here is a quick Cricut Search Tip for you.  For those of you that don't know, my family created the website Cricut Search to help people find images that are on Cricut cartridges.  People have compared it to a search engine for Cricut images.


If you are looking for an image of a kite, you can type in the word kite to the search bar and hit search, and Cricut Search will show you a preview of all of the Cricut cartridge handbook pages that have a kite image on them.

Now, if you cannot see the images when they are this small, you can click on any one of the images to get a larger preview, like this . . . 

Still need it larger?  Click on the LARGE preview, and you will see that one page even larger.

Now on to the tip . . . what if you type in your search item, like we did for kite, and when you click on the preview it brings you to a totally different page of a cartridge that was not on the original  search results?  What is wrong?  This is most likely an internet cookies issue, and you need to delete internet cookies.  Sometimes the cookies will hold on to a past search for some odd reason, so by clearing the cookies you are wiping the slate clean so that you can do your new search.  We have this and other tips on our Troubleshooting page.

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Phrases with apostrophes in them

Our English teachers taught us that punctuation is important, but I found out over the weekend that SOMETIMES punctuation can be a bad thing.  Let me explain what I mean.

In the world of data and programming, some punctuation marks serve a function OTHER that what it was intended for in the English language.  Sometimes the difference between a program working correctly is the difference between a comma and a semi-colon.  Changing that one little punctuation mark changes that function and the outcome of the entire program.

What does this have to do with a crafting blog?  Well, over the weekend I found out that if you are searching for a phrase on Cricut Search and there is an apostrophe in that phrase, it will not allow the search function of the site to work as it was intended.  How do I know this?  If you search It's a girl on Cricut Search you will get no matches in your search.  But, if you search a girl . . . just dropping the word It's you will find all of the cartridges that have the phrase It's a girl on them.

I am trying to decide if I want to go back through the cartridges and remove all apostrophes from phrases.  Maybe this is a project I can assign to one of the kids over the summer.  For now, just remember to drop any word that contains an apostrophe from your search.


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Searching for Fonts with a Shadow Cut

Grab a cup of coffee and get ready for something that I would like to become a regular feature on this blog . . . the Cricut Search Tips.  I am going to share some tips on features and searches you might not even know that you can do with Cricut Search.


If you have ever been working on a project where you KNEW you wanted to use two colors on your lettering to give it that layered effect, like this.

To do this, you would need to use a font that includes a shadow cut feature.  Well, if you are like me, before Cricut Search came along you would flip through all of your font handbooks to find the PERFECT font for your project, only to be disappointed when you saw that there was no shadow cut feature for that font.  Well not anymore!  What if you could JUST preview the fonts that HAVE a shadow cut?  Let me show you how you can do this.

Let's use the image in the layout above for an example of how to search for images with shadow cuts.

First, go to Cricut Search, and on the left hand side you will see Advanced Cricut Search.  It is the third item down on the list.  Click on that.

That will take you to a screen that looks like this.

Next, 

Make sure the keywords box is un-checked

Check the font box and check the character-number-symbol box

In the search bar, type in 

s shadow

The image below shows the boxes you should have checked, and along with the search parameter information.

Click on search

Now you will see only the pages with a letter S that also has a shadow cut!

Remember, you can always click on any of these images to get a larger preview, which would look like this.

And if that is still not big enough for you, you can click on the single preview image to enlarge that one more time.

I hope that this helped you to learn something new about Cricut Search, and how you can use it for your papercrafting needs.  Please feel free to re-post this information on your blog to share this tip with others who might use Cricut Search.

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