Water Spout

I wanted to do a layout of The Itsy Bitsy Spider and this is how I made the water spout using Plantin Schoolbook and my wonderful Gypsy.   It really is amazing how you can take some basic shapes, manipulate them, weld them and make something totally different.   Who would think you could make a water spout with a minus sign, a bracket, an exclamation point and a square?

My first step was to find a photo of a water spout.  I found one and then opened up the trial version of Design Studio, just to see the shapes better and to play around with sizing and placement for a 12 inch layout.   I wanted a long pipe (skinny rectangle) or minus sign.  I placed it on the design mat.  And then added the brackets.  I hid one of the brackets and then layered the bracket on the pipe and it really did kind of look like the water spout in the picture.   I decided on the exclamation point turned on its side with the dot part hid and then copied it and flipped one and then lined them up with the dot part in the center.  Added a small square to the center of it and it doesn't look exactly like the photo I found but it really is close.

Then I grabbed the gypsy and thought it would be easy to just set the sizes that I used in DS but it didn't exactly work that way.   The minus sign shape is actually a lot larger than the actual cut so it is sized correctly when actually used as a minus sign, but no biggie, I just resized it until it looked right.  I then placed the bracket in place, grouped them together and welded it.    At this point if I had cut it out like that it would have cut a bracket centered on a rectangle.  I could have easily cut off the part I didn't want with a scissors  but then I would probably mess up and have to cut another.  So what I did was copied the minus sign and placed it so it lined up with the edge of the other one. Do not weld this as you will just end up with a wide pipe.  You want it to cut that line between the two rectangles. 

I then cut a sample and I remembered to take a photo.

I took a marker to show the cut lines. You can see how part of the bracket cut.  Then I remembered to take another photo.   This is pretty amazing because I always forget to take the photo.

I then went back to the gypsy to make the handle.  I cut the welded together exclamation points with the square in the center and then copied the square and cut it by itself.   Wow 3 pictures. 

Yay, I did it.  I did make the handle a bit smaller in my final project and I probably could have went even in smaller, but overall I am very happy with how it turned out.  Besides who is going to notice that the handle might be a little out of proportion after I put my handsome grandson's photo on the page!  

So I hope this gives you some idea of what is possible with the gypsy and 4 basic shapes that really are on most cartridges.  If there is something you really want on a layout but don't have it on a cartridge, take a different look at what you do have.  It might be there hidden in a font cartridge.