Sunday-right-here – Word Rosettes

29/07/2012 by UKMA 7 Comments

Enough people commented yesterday that they liked these that I carried on playing and made a PDF of some useful greetings.

I’m going to assume you know how to score and accordion fold rosettes.  If not, there are loads of YouTube videos for that, mine is just one. I would suggest using thinner patterned PAPER and not cardstock – I think that will be too thick, but hey, give it a go and let me know if it works!  Also if someone has the TH rosette die and wants to see if this can be made to work with that, I’d love to know.  I think the scores are 1/4 in that but don’t know for sure.  I am pretty sure the longer words won’t work but will any of them?

I use the Martha Stewart Score Board. To make these I use the BLACK lines (1/4 inch spacing) and the PDF is designed to fit that.  But lots of things may affect your attempts.

I thought about adding this as a PSE file, but frankly I think that wouldn’t work.  For a start, if you don’t have these fonts installed they will all appear in whatever your default font is.  And each font I used is sized to fit and they are not all the same point size.  I must have printed 20 test sheets, and scored them, then made tiny adjustments to try to make sure the text fell as it should. See my “scooch” notations?

At the bottom of this post I’ll give you some guidance as to HOW I did it so you can make your own file if you don’t like my greeting and font choices!

• if your printer adds a margin the PDF of text might be shifted down slightly.

Solution: line up the first groove so it falls just at the top of the first word (a SMIDGE above) then carry on scoring.  It SHOULD match pretty closely.

• it still doesn’t match, you say? 

Solution: Try to use the thinnest stylus you can.  My thoughts on this are that we are dealing with tiny increments.  As the stylus pushes the paper down into the groove, in is imperceptibly shifting it a teeny amount.  20+ score lines and it adds up. If you are scoring a STRIP, and not the whole page at once, you can shift the paper left or right as need be so the score line falls where you need it to.  If you saw my decorative edged Rosettes thing on YouTube (well over 2 years ago) you will see IT DOES NOT MATTER if your lines are all 100% the same.  Once you flatten it out, a smidge this way or that won’t affect the look by much.

There is some flexibility in the width you cut your strips.  But, they must be between 1 inch and 1 1/2 inches.  If you make them wider than that, because the PDF is based on an A4 sheet of paper (but made to accommodate  US letter paper) the text strip is no longer than 11 inches.  If you cut it wider than 1 1/2 inches, the paper may tear as you flatten it.

In general, I keep the aligned edge of the words pretty close to the edge of the paper, leaving the empty area on the other side.  Especially for the longer ones, like ANNIVERSARY, it keeps most of the word visible once you form the rosette.

As I mentioned, you can score the entire sheet and then cut your strips and fold.  The you will have a stash of rosettes for when you need them.  If you want just one, copy the word strip into another file and print, or print once, cut strips from a number of papers, adhere them to the first print and print again so you have each set of words on different papers.

The other issue is the centers.  You will need to use something fairly small for all but the 1 1/2 inch strip, or the decoration will obscure the words.  See what I used for guidance.

At the back I add a circle of cardstock covered in adhesive – that plus the brad thru the middle holds them just fine.  A dollop of hot glue in the middle works too.

Here you can see the 1 1/2 inch, 1 1/4 inch and 1 inch rosettes:

I thought about trying to make a set to fit a strip edged with a scallop punch, but there are so many on the market, so many measurements of scallops, and life is too short!

How I did it, in case you want to make your own:

Easy Peasy. This is the program I use, and you can see how the words are arranged:

• Open a file in whatever you use for this sort of work.
• Trigger the GRID, making it .25 inches (1/4 inch)
• Type your text.  Make sure each word is centred within the grid lines top and bottom
• Leave a blank grid.  So Happy then a blank 1/4 inch, then Birthday. Repeat to fill the length of the paper.
• Select all the text and either CENTRE it or ALIGN RIGHT (or left, I suppose it doesn’t matter)
• Print the strip of words and make your first score line just over the text.  Then, as I say above, you SHOULD be able to score at 1/4 inch all along the strip.

There may be a bit of trial and error to the process (there was for me) but you’ll get there. I hope you have fun with this!