After making the slice form sphere with a pop-up base. I tried to insert the pop-up into an A7 envelope. Much to my disappointment, it was too big by 1/4 inch. Typically, slice forms can not be resized because the slits in the paper need to accommodate the thickness of a piece of paper.
The slice form was 1/4 inch too big for the A7 envelope.
I looked at the original size of the slits of the slice form sphere and they were .02 inches wide. The slits in the slice form base were a little smaller at .17 inches wide. I know that the slits can be as tight as .15 inches wide (not optimal but it does work). Resizing the design would be easy with the Silhouette software, so there is no harm in trying this method before redoing the slice form models. To resize the 4 inch slice form sphere to a 3 3/4 inch sphere. I calculated that I needed a .9375 scaling factor.
3.75/4 = .9375 scaling factor
In the Edit function, select all. This will put a bounding box around the entire design.
In the Transform function, under scale, use a .9375 scaling factor. After the entire design was rescaled, I determined the smallest slit was .17 inches and that is an acceptable slit width.
The point of this blog posting is that while conventions might indicate that something won't work. Try it anyway, I had nothing to lose except a few minutes of time. This is one of the reasons I like designing with paper. It is quick to experiment and the cost of the paper is reasonable. I typically make the same model over and over again until I am satisfied with the results. I have high standards and will not concede. In this case, it was a simple solution of rescaling the design.
My resized pop-up slice form now fits in an A7 envelope.
