For the initial Turtle Art Pt. 2 design, I challenged myself by originally aiming to draw a bakery storefront with a croissant, baguette, and any other baked goods I would think of on the spot. I spent hours trying to make a cute croissant and baguette, but honestly, it just wasn't happening (see image carousel below). The difficulty of drawing complex, curved objects using those basic Turtle commands was immediately obvious. So, I gave up on the food concept and pivoted to a flower shop.

My thought process shifted to treating the coding like an Etch A Sketch: I realized I had to stick to simple lines and geometric shapes. I started by positioning the Turtle in the bottom-left quadrant to draw the main storefront rectangle. I then created the window using repetitive lines and the shades using the arc method and lines. For the flowers, I drew inspiration from shapes in the books to create my own variations. I always drew the flower elements in the same order: flower pot first, followed by the stem, leaves, and finally the flower itself.

I chose the Cricut for this project because I am already familiar with using a Cricut (and because Cammy was occupied during the times I went in). Using the Cricut for basic vinyl cutting was straightforward, despite it freezing and shutting down on me a few times.

The cutting and peeling of the vinyl process presented some challenges:

• Visibility: The glitter vinyl was difficult to weed because the basic cut lines were barely visible, and the cuts were like getting pizza from a shop that has dull pizza cutters.

• Tearing: I had the most trouble with the larger shapes' thin components, specifically the window shades and the fine lines for the storefront. I went through three iterations of the shades because the vinyl kept tearing during peeling. I even tried thickening the lines to 2mm in Adobe Illustrator, but the dimensions scaled down when transferred to the Cricut software.

  • Funny enough, I had no issues cutting or peeling the more complex flowers...

To resolve these issues and stop wasting vinyl, I decided to pivot my strategy. I stopped trying to peel the fine lines of the storefront out of the glitter background. Instead, I used the full glitter sheet as the storefront background, which also had the benefit of making the flowers stand out. I then placed the window shades on top of the storefront layer, rather than trying to place them in front as intended. I mistakenly cut out the bottom part of the first two shade arcs during the peeling process, so they ended up missing in the final piece.