A Little Birdy told me Birthday card..."Make the Print-n-Cut" technique (Step Four)

Step Four: Printing and Cutting

You are now ready to print.  Load your paper (or card stock) into your printer.  In MTC, go to File-->Print Preview to see how it will look on your paper. Here's how it looks for my printer.  Notice that here is lots of room around the area that you want to cut that is in color.

In MTC, turn off the eyes to the cutting layers.  All that will be showing on your sccreen will be the blocks of color.

At this point, you can do another Print preview to see what it looks like.  If you have "outline shapes" checked, there will be black outline around the color box.  If you want you can uncheck this box so that there is no outline.

Now you are ready to print!  Make sure your paper is loaded (double check that "Print to wireframe is not checked), and go to File-->Print. Your print out should look similar to this, just blocks of color on a blank page.

Place this paper onto your Cricut cutting mat, taking care that it is aligned well on the corner with the sides straight.





Load the mat into the Cricut and cut.  Your results should be similar to this:



And when removed form the mat:

You can now assemble your bird and place it on you card front.

(That d*ng little right leg fell into my keyboard between the keys, took me forever to pull him out.  He has a little mark on his leg, a scar from his adventures.)

Card background is made with files from the papers in the Banner Day Mini Album Graphic set.  I brought them into PSE and altered the hue to my liking, and printed out the result.  But PSE is another tutorial.