Luck o' the Irish!

It's time for another challenge over at Scrappy Frog's Challenge Blog - this month's challenge is to use green in your project.  For my project this month, I used vinyl and made a custom umbrella stand / flower bucket. (We live in a heavily Irish-Catholic area, so many of our neighbors would not limit the use of this to March!)

 

I cut all of my images using Make The Cut software.  I found a simple shamrock image to trace into the software, then did a search for an image using the terms "celtic knot border".  I found several borders, but many were too intricate for cutting from vinyl.  I chose this simple knot design, and after tracing it into the software, I resized it so the border along the top edge is wider than the border along the bottom edge.

A note for those of you new to working on 3-D items: when attaching a border on an object like this that widens, it will naturally want to curve rather than lay straight.  You can account for this in the software by using a Conical Warp, however I find it pretty simple on larger items like this to just adjust it manually.  For this design, I did have to make a couple of snips in the design to lay portions flat, but I find that easier than the measuring required to use the software feature.  For smaller items like mugs and cups, the Conical Warp is a MUST, and pretty easy to use.

That's it for today! I hope you enjoyed my project, and I hope you find some time to come play with us at Scrappy Frog's this month!