I got the hold notice from the library and rushed to find out which book was there. It was the first book I had ordered on paper engineering. I could hardly wait to get into it and see if I could perfect the craft on a basic level for my daily challenge.
Lo and behold, there were some beginner projects I could try.
Now I must say that paper engineering looks really complicated. I have seen popup cards but most do not take the skill to the next level (of course there are a few exceptions - but not as many as I thought there might be).
This particular book went into the history of paper engineering with the early days of pop-up book pages that were incredibly intricate. Those pages would take hours and hours of practice to even get to that level. I guess the same is true for any craft. For me, starting at the basic level is where I wanted to go for my first project.
To start, a simple drawing of what you wanted was the first requisite. Following the pages in the book, I came up with a simple two-tiered fold with a cut. Now I really did not want to measure everything by hand so I opened up design space from Cricut. Here I could control the length and size of score lines and cut lines. Or at least I thought I could.
The first stumbling block was to figure a way to convert their shapes into lines so I would not be cutting out pieces I wanted scored. After that adding a scallop was also a challenge as I only wanted to cut the rounded edge on one side and not lop it off on the top. More fiddling around and slicing brought a result I could live with but knew I would have to find a way to make an improvement. Perhaps next time I would work in Illustrator and save my scores and cuts in an SVG file. But that is for another day.
Here is what I did for my first pass. Today I am going to try adding to it with additional designs. it is so much fun trying out something new!
I know they do not look like much but it took me a few hours to do the measuring, trying test cuts and then finally these. The scallops took forever! I think I now have a handle on these basics. So on to something more difficult for tomorrow.
Bette
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