Nothing makes a cake pop more than a 3D cake topper. They are pretty simple to assemble but how do you actually design them to be 3D? Well, in this tutorial I’ll show you how to use Inkscape to design a 3D cake topper that you can cut with your Cricut.
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First you’ll need to download Inkscape. It’s a free and safe download. Inkscape is pretty vast but don’t get overwhelmed. We’re only going to use a small portion of it for today’s tutorial.
Chose Your Theme
If you have your theme all picked out and you’ve already downloaded a few SVG files (like an ice cream cone, unicorn, dinosaur, whatever your theme is) go ahead and import them into Inkscape now. Head up to the top menu bar and click “File” and then “Import” and select your files. You don’t have to have any extra embellishments for this to work so if you don’t have a theme or any files to import you can skip this part.
Create Your Design
Next type in the name and the age of the person you’re making the 3D cake topper for. You can use FontCloud to choose the prefect font and get the extra flourishes (the video below goes over this in more detail). Once everything is in Inkscape its time to arrange all the parts and get your design looking just the way you want it.
Make it 3D
Okay, so you have your basic 2D design finished. Now comes the fun part of making this a 3D cake topper! The main thing we’re doing here is adding layers of different sizes. You want to start with your extra parts like the name and any added embellishments. We need to give these parts a background to sit on so they stand out. To do this we create an offset.
Create the Offset
Let’s use the ice cream cone for example. The ice cream cone I have in the video has 4 layers (the cone, the waffle design, the chocolate ice cream and the strawberry topping). We can only create an offset for one layer so we need to combine all 4 of the ice cream cones layers into one. You do this by selecting 2 layers at a time and then going to “Path” and “Combine”. (The video above goes over this in more detail.) Once you have all the layers combined you can now create your offset. Just click on your solid layer then go to “Path” and “Linked Offset”. Your cursor will change and you can then drag the diamond (or use the quick command “Ctrl + )”) to create the offset.
Now you’ll do the same for the name and age. Before the offset process can work you will need to turn the name and age into a path (rather than just text). To do this select your word and go to “Path” and “Object to Path”. This will turn your text into a path. You then need to combine all the letters together just like you did for the ice cream cone. Once the name is combined into one path/layer you can create the offset and do the same for your number.
Add in all the Layers
Once you have your main offsets created you will just continue to make more offsets of them until you have all the layers you want for your 3D cake topper. In my example I had 4 total layers but you could have more or less. It just depends on what you want.
Please make sure to watch the video as it covers much more that you may need to know if you’re not totally familiar with Inkscape and how it works.
