Make the Cut, Cricut, and my opinion....

I've been on the fence about the whole MTC/Provocraft brouhaha.  Until yesterday, that is.  I wanted to create this shaped card.  I love the Tilda Honey image and had a dream about how it would look on a bee hive (don't laugh, I get many of my ideas from dreams).  So, I opened my Cricut Design Studio software and went looking for a beehive.  As luck would have it, I had lots of options and had most of the cartridges because I'm a cartridge junkie.  I settled on this little beehive from Walk in My Garden.  I added the shadow image to my mat, sized it and copied it.  I pasted my second image on my mat and then tried to manipulate it so the two images were top to top.  First of all, CDS does not have a flip horizontally, just vertically.  Second, CDS doesn't have an align so you couldn't make sure they were lined up before I welded them.  So, since I'm anally organized, I had a link I saved teaching me how to use this image in MTC.  I followed these instructions, imported my image into MTC, copied, flipped horizontally, aligned the left sides, wrote down the size of one image, welded the two images together and .... Bob's your uncle.  Then, I went back to my CDS, sized the actual image (not the shadowed image) a bit smaller than the shadowed image in MTC, and cut it out in gold cardstock.  I inked the edges with ColorBox Cat's Eye Ochre.

I'm only sorry that I was so late to see the benefits of using MTC with Cricut images.  My computer was in the shop so I was unable to get the latest version of MTC that works with the Cricut.  My work-around was to have two copies of MTC on my computer.  I use v.3.2.1 without the Cricut driver in order to see newer MTC files.  From there, I can copy them and paste them into my MTC v.2.3.2 with the Cricut driver so I can cut them.  If I had my computer, I would have updated to v.3.2.1 with the Cricut driver and I wouldn't need two versions.  Luckily for me, this option works.  I plan to make more shaped cards like this, I think they're fun.

Paper:  Stash; Stamps: Magnolia Honey Tilda, PaperTrey Honey Bees, Stamping Scrapping.com Fancy Accents; Cricut Walk in the Garden; Make the Cut; Copics: [Skin E000, E11, R20][Hair E43, E53, E51][Clothes N5, N3, Y19, Y17, YR16][Wings Crystal Stickles, Sparkling Ice Glitter]