How To Download, Unzip & Upload SVG Files – A Tutorial

After receiving my shiny new Cricut Maker a few of months ago, it’s fair to say I’m now a little bit addicted to paper crafting!
One of my favourite sites to download SVG files from is Dreaming Tree. I stumbled across them while Googling for free SVG files.
I’m now a member of the Dreaming Tree Facebook group and I love looking through all the results. Each person puts their own creative style into the projects so no matter how many ‘exquisite eggs’ or ‘darling dress’ cards are shared, they’re all different and provide me with lots of inspiration for my own projects.

Design Space

SVG files are used by Design Space, which is the online design software for Cricut. You upload the files to Design Space and it then sends instructions to the machine, telling it what you want it to do.

Dreaming Tree has many videos on their site to help you learn. If you prefer videos to written tutorials, the videos that show you how to unzip and upload the Dreaming Tree SVG files can be found here.

Video Tutorials

I don’t much care for video tutorials personally, especially on my phone. I find myself having to rewind the video often as I get behind and miss bits. It’s harder to rewind on my phone because of the smaller screen and my chunky fingers!
With a written tutorial, I don’t need to do anything except scroll to the next instruction when I’m ready 🙂

Dreaming Tree Tutorial – How to download, unzip and upload files to Design Space

With this in mind, and knowing I’m not the only one who prefers written instructions, I’m going to show you today how I download an SVG file from Dreaming Tree, how to unzip it when you have it on your Windows machine and how to upload it to Design Space.

I created an account at Dreaming Tree because I plan to be a long term customer! The following tutorial assumes you’ve created an account and are logged in.

We’ll be using the High Heel greeting card file. This is a free download.

Click the following link to be taken to the download page – High Heel Greeting Card
Add the file to your shopping cart.

Click on your shopping cart and click Checkout

Click Place Order

You will receive an email confirming your purchase and there will be a link in it which will take you to the download. Alternatively, go to your account and click on Downloads

Find the file and click the blue button to download it.

I created a new folder in my Documents folder and called it Dreaming Tree. When you’ve picked your folder, click Save

Open the folder that contains your file and right click on the zip file. On the dropdown menu, click Extract All

A window will pop up telling you which folder the files will be extracted to. On my laptop, it always chooses the folder I’m already in so I never change the file destination.

You will now have the extracted folder and the empty zipped folder.

Right click on the zip folder and click on Delete

You will now have the folder containing your svg files. Click on it to open it.

Inside this folder, you have another folder titled SVG. Click this folder to open it.

Inside the SVG folder, you’ll see two more folders and the SVG files. You need to upload all the SVG files to Design Space, including the SVG files in the envelope folder.
For the purpose of today’s tutorial, I won’t be using the extra files. The Extras folder contains a solid scorelines file and a Caption file. I’ll cover these in a later tutorial.

Open Design Space and click New Project

You will now have a blank canvas. Click Upload

Click Upload Image

Click Browse

Browse to the folder that contains your SVG files and click elements_peapod.svg

When it opens in Design Space, click Save

Your new file will now show on your Recently Uploaded Images.

Repeat the process until you have all 4 SVG files uploaded into Design Space.
Don’t forget, like I did when making this tutorial, to go back and upload the envelope file in the same way! You should have 5 files, not 4 as in the screenshot.

Click on each of the five(!) files and click Insert Images

You will now have the files on the canvas of Design Space. Down the side, you can see the layer palette.

You now need to look at each layer in turn and see if any of them need attaching. The attach button is kind of like a paperclip; it clips 2 layers together so when you move them, they stay together and remain in the right place. If you didn’t attach the layers, the machine would put both layers on separate mats or on the same mat but not in the correct place.

The elements_peapod, elements_salmon and panel_black_pattern are single layers and don’t have any parts that need attaching. When you click on these layers, the actions at the bottom, including Attach won’t be available.

The main_white has a separate cut layer. This cut layer is in place of a solid scoring layer. This means that those who don’t have a scoring wheel or scoring tool will have tiny little cuts in a straight line in the place where the card needs to be folded.
If you click on main_white and look at the bottom of the layer palette, you’ll see that Attach is now available to click.
Click Attach

The Attached layer will now move to the top.

You need to do the same with the envelope layer because it has a layer that needs attaching so the score lines are in the right place.

You can now click the save button and save your project. It will then be available in your projects every time you want to make a new card.
Just click save and give your project a name.

Click Make It

You will now be taken to the Prepare Mats screen.

That’s it for this tutorial. If you’d like to carry on and see the cutting and assembling process click for Part 2