Mini Cupcakes Need Their Own Wrap!

One of my ongoing challenges with Design Space (and Cricut Access) has been that of creating cupcake wrappers with organizational logos. My issues have been mostly registration issues, where my logo would end up too high or too low, or the Explore Air would not "cut on the lines" of my cupcake wrappers.

Leading into this year's AVENGER anniversary party (I've been a member of the USS AVENGER chapter of STARFLEET, The International Star Trek^® Fan Association since its inception, 34 years ago), I decided to tackle the cupcake wrapper issue again — this time using Print Then Cut to get my alignment just right.

Starting with the cupcake wrapper files I had saved in Adobe Illustrator, I moved my wrappers into a space that would fit into Print Then Cut's limitations (6.25" x 9"). I added my logos, then saved the file once as an .svg and once as a .jpg, and uploaded them to Design Space.

While Design Space understood the files, more or less, and could cut on my lines, I could not get it to not cut out the logo, regardless of how I uploaded the file, and regardless of whether I designated the design as Cut or as a Print Then Cut. (The only difference was whether it tried to cut just the outline, or every little color change.)

Finally, I tried something else. I created a second file identical to my logo-bearing file, but without the logo. I added a 4-point-stroke, no-fill rectangle around the wrappers so Design Space would know exactly where to cut.To prevent errant lines, I set the stroke of my wrapper outlines to None in both files. (The downloadable .ai file has hairline strokes so you can see where to place your logos.Select the wrapper outlines and set your stroke to None before printing.) I uploaded the second file as a Print Then Cut file, and loaded it onto my canvas (the project is available on my Cricut profile page). I printed the file from my original (logo-bearing) file, and when I went to Make the wrappers in Design Space, I clicked on the "I've already printed" link to skip printing out a blank rectangle.

I ended up with perfect cupcake wrappers — but I had a number of mini cupcakes, and they needed to be wrapped as well!

Try as I could, I could not find a premade design for mini-cupcake wrappers — so I did what any engineer would do: I ASSumed the two sizes of cupcakes had the same exact proportions, and based on a 3" top versus a 2" top, scaled everything down to two-thirds.

Yes, there's a reason it's spelled ASS-U-ME. When we went to wrap the mini cupcakes before icing them, we found the wrappers were over a quarter inch too tall, and didn't have enough curvature to hug the bottom of the cupcake liner. Well, so much for wowwing folk with the minis at the event — but afterwards, it was back to the drawing board.

The wrapper sticks out the bottom (too tall),
and there is excess space around the bottom of the mini-cupcake (not curved enough)

After a bunch of trial and error, I'm down to something that's about the right length and the right curvature, but if your mini cupcake has any sort of "muffin top", it's still about 1/8" too tall.

Original 2/3 size, interrim rework, final rework

(If it's just filled to the top of the tin, with a very little crown, the design works fine.)

The mini cupcake wrapper is available on my Cricut profile.

Business Card Thoughts

Despite it being the age of bump-or-touch to transfer contact information, most of us still need, prefer, expect, or collect the paper précis of our professional identities and contact information in the form of 3.5" x 2" pieces of cardstock known as business cards or calling cards. As someone who crafts, instructs, is an officer of a local computer club, a long-standing member of an international fan association, and who has been active in the Diabetes Online Community, I have needed to carry several different versions of these cards, each of which requires a different professional or personal identity, and different subsets of my contact information.

Computer Club (current)

Blogger Card (Blog is still there, just inactive)

While most business-facing people never need to carry more than one version of their card at any time, those of us with social lives or "side hustles" cannot afford to be so narrow-minded.

Early version of our Web Warren cards

The speed with which our social lives change mean that for many of us, ordering 500 business cards through a service like VistaPrint means that 400 or more are likely to be obsolete before they get handed out. For us, home printing has been the service of choice for the past 20 years or so. We purchase 50-sheet (500-card) packages of microperforated paper from Staples, download the appropriate template from Avery (or create our own), add in our personal information, and press "Print".

Front of 2013 diabetes card 2014 card removes AOL Instant Messenger

That said, home printing for me entails a lot of waste. Some of that is because the margins on business cards are so narrow that a slight misregistration ends up with print trailing into the perforated margins (or worse, onto adjacent cards on the page), and some of that because I've had a number of two-sided designs that misfed or misregistered on the second side, rendering a sheet of paper... useless.

Back of 2013 diabetes card 2014 card removes defunct communities, updates Tour de Cure information

Right now, we're at the stage of having to purchase a new pack of business card blanks. Unlike 20 years ago (or even 10!), the cost seems quite expensive compared to what I remember, and even compared to some of VistaPrint's higher-quality offerings. In comparison, cardstock is relatively cheap, and the flexibility of Design Space's "Print then Cut" feature made me wonder what Cricut's business-card potential might be.

(This is not to say that home electronic cutting machines would be the only way to create business cards from non-perforated cardstock: good manual paper cutters run half the price and serve admirably in a pinch. The problems are that the paper often shifts, and you don't have the sort of precision you can get from an electronic machine.)

For my latest Craft Instructor business cards, I wanted to work with the "Marble Glitter Business Card" template I'd gotten through an email subscription to Font Bundles/Design Bundles. I had some initial font issues in InDesign. After finding and installing the correct typeface and running a test print, the writing came out looking washed out, and the colors were too brownish. Since the original design was a Photoshop file, I opened it to edit. Photoshop CS4 only showed me one business card at the time. I tried Word, but it wasn't letting me layer text over the image frame. It was at this point that I imported the Photoshop-edited single-card graphic into Design Space.I resized the graphic to what seemed a reasonable size, not realizing it was meant as a full-bleed design, meant to be cut inside the decorative border. I ended up with six cards, approximately 3.6" wide by 2 1/6" tall — a bit larger than the standard 3.5" x 2" North American business card. I Attached the cards together to force Design Space to Print Then Cut a three by two grid of them on a single page of cardstock, rather than trying to make them all right-side up and spread over two pages.

I next tried to create a bordered card using one of the "Gold Digital Papers" designs from Design Bundles. I rescaled the paper from a 12" x 12" background to 1.25" and tiled it over a business card template in InDesign. I layered an opaque white rectangle in front, and my text box on top, and exported my single card to an importable .jpg file. After uploading my card to Design Space and resizing it a bit, I used the Square from Basic Shapes and elongated it into a 3.5" x 2" rectangle, centered it over the card, tweaked my card size, and Sliced the two layers it to create my business card. Setting these cards one next to the other which comes out to three rows of two cards, rotated sideways, plus one card in readable orientation. These printed out well, but my choice of typeface resulted in unreadably small text.

Finally, I used a background from a group called "Set of Marble Texture Cards" along with the "LD Laundry" typeface to create something a bit whimsical. I also used the Web Warren's short URL generator to create a custom link to my Design Space profile. Between this version and the gold-and-black design, I found that even Print Then Cut can end up with very small registration errors that can mar the final finish of your business card.

I reformatted my canvas with the Marble Texture card to allow for bleed. This reduced my yield per sheet of cardstock from 7 to 6. At a retail price of $16 per 100-sheet pack of 100-lb cardstock, this comes out to just under three cents per card for the cardstock. Compare this to $25 per 500-card (50-sheet) package of microperforated business card blanks, and you come out ahead, despite the larger volume of wasted-space on a page. Of course, if you're like me and buy on sale or with a coupon, your costs may be a bit less. Then again, the amount of time it takes to feed page after page of cardstock into the printer and then your cutter may make the costs of a service... worth it.

Update: check these posts for info on how to make a matching business card holder for a desk or display table:
Upright Business Card Holder
Slanted Business Card Holder

It Still Doesn't Register...

Registration: the alignment of multiple processing passes on the same sheet of paper, so a single multicolor or multiprocess image is produced. 

Coming from the world of photography and printing, I see perfect registration as a requirement to make sure my images and cut works line up so there's no offset of one color to another, or of image to cut. It's something I expect of any color printer — and which, until now, I expected to be standard for any cutting machine. If I have to manually align a paper for multiple passes, I'll set my program to print the registration marks which allow me to perform the alignment myself.

One of the issues I've been having with getting my Cricut to do what I want it to is its inconsistency in registering to the same spot on its cuttting mat, or — more importantly — to the material on the cutting mat. This is annoying because it makes it difficult to do precision cuts on unusual shapes, and to do registered cuts on preprinted materials — such as personalized cupcake wrappers and flags for an event.

Cupcake flag and wrapper for New Jersey Libertarian Party event

Cricut's Design Space has a "print and cut" feature which is supposed to make this sort of thing easy: print your design out onto an appropriate paper through Design Space, which adds registration marks to your graphics, and then cuts out the intricate shapes of your printed item.

There are some problems with this:
1. The maximum size of a print-and-cut graphic is about 9" x 6", which is nowhere near the size of the standard cutting mat, and a bit small for adult t-shirts.
2. The "print" part of print-and-cut is much too low a resolution to be useful
3. The "cut" part of print-and-cut either tries to cut out every single color change, causing the knife to shred the project, or only cuts the outlines of the printed portion (as if you were making a sticker), with no obvious option for anything different.

DIY'ing the sequence isn't much better. While you can print and adjust to the entire size of the sheet, the cutting will end up in different areas from one mat feed to the next. A few YouTubers have suggested that adding a bounding box at the edges of your image (or paper) will help with registration, but I've not found it a perfect match.

The red rectangle is my Cricut's DIY "registration" marks for US letter-size paper

That said, there's one additional step that looks like it might help (though it may "ruin" a mat): I ran an old mat through the Cricut several times with the bounding box set to "write" and found that my Cricut has a specific offset for 11 x 8.5" paper and cardstock (US standard letter size paper, matted landscape). If I set my letter-sized paper to the marks I've made on the mat, I'm getting something closer to a usable registration, if not what I would consider acceptable registration.

Registration Errors

Note that the bounding lines on the flags and some of the wrappers are visible, and how they vary from cupcake to cupcake.

On the plus side, after a lot of trial and error (and wasted cardstock), I got the Cricut to cut everything out without mangling the pre-printed images. On the minus side, I still had those outline marks. Since this was a bit of a test project, I went with the stock I managed to print out. For future events, I can "hide" the outline layer so it won't print, and my cupcake flags and wrappers should be perfect.