The time has come to experiment with loop cuts. Baby Fred has spent time figuring out the best way to change the shape of this humble cube. She got stuck when trying to extrude only a part of a face.
Fred went loopy trying to figure this out. She put her engineering hat on and thought deeply about what she needed to do. She also needed to have a clear picture in her head of what the completed object had to look like. If she had a way to cut a shape (in this case, a rectangle) into a part of a face, she would be able to extrude only that part. The lights went on in her little baby Blender head and she thought of the Loop Cut tool.
The loop cut tool adds new cuts to the mesh of an object. In this case, it meant that a new face could be cut out of the original face. That face can then be extruded. Baby Fred realised, in hindsight, that trying to think like the professional Blender gurus does not work. She needs to think like a beginner and keep it simple and uncomplicated. It is possible that there is a better, more efficient method of reaching the same result, but for now, according to Fred, the loop cut tool is the perfect solution.
The next thing was to figure out how to do the actual loop cut in Blender 3D.
A loop cut is added a certain distance from an existing edge. The big blender guys say “click and drag” or click and roll the mouse wheel to make more than one loop cut. So, I click and drag, and the whole viewport changes. Uh oh! Now I have lost my object in the viewport, and I cannot get it back. It is gone out of sight and lost into the black hole that is the computer screen. Fred takes a quick journey through her memory which is not serving her very well at this moment. How will she find the missing object in the viewport? I scramble like an egg on a Sunday morning breakfast plate but finally find the answer. No time to waste. My “mentor, guru guy” is waiting to inspect my first object. He may not be put on hold.
I go to the outliner, and I select the guilty object. Then I hit the full stop on the Numpad 
. This brings back the object. I can breathe again.
Back to the loop cut now. My “mentor, guru guy” is very determined that I should get used to keyboard shortcuts. “Baby Fred needs to learn the correct working methods from the start, or she will develop bad habits”, he says. It so happens that I have a list of shortcuts, and I consult my dictionary, which tells me about loop cuts. In there, amazingly and by some miracle, is the shortcut key. It is easy: 
Now, why did I not do this in the first place? It would have saved me some time and heartache. The moral of the story? When you have a list of shortcut keys, keep it close by and not hidden away somewhere in a folder on the computer.
When you understand Loop Cuts, it is easy to do. Go to edit mode. Press . Hover where you want the loop cut to be, and if it appears, click and drag it to where it needs to be. There are different options when placing the Loop Cut. For example, how many cuts you would like to add. It helps to read up about loop cuts to see these options. See this article for more details on Loop Cuts.
Well done, Fred! I pat myself on the diaper, put my soother in and sit back and look at my work of art, but I quickly feel a poke in the ribs. That voice of my “mentor, guru guy” rings loudly in my ears. “No time to rest. You are far from done!”. Oops! I better get moving. I need to stay in the good books with “mentor, guru guy”. Gee! A girl can’t even relax for one minute.
