Category: Tutorial

Blog Party + Vinyl Tutorial + Freebie

It’s Day 3 of our Blog Party! We have another FREEBIE at the end of today’s post so be sure to keep reading…
We have a fantastic vinyl tutorial today by CT member, Mendi. Thank you Mendi for sharing your expertise with all of us!
Here’s what Mendi has to say:
“Today I have an easy step-by-step tutorial sharing how to cut and use vinyl which I used on a simple little card (featuring Lori’s super fun Here & Now collection which she designed for Echo Park).  While vinyl is perfect for so many home decor projects, I  personally adore using it for my cards and scrapbook layouts.  It’s the perfect medium for cutting delicate files that would ordinarily shred cardstock.”

“I started off by planning the basic layout of my card by assembling it visually in my Silhouette software, changing the fill colors to get a feel for what papers I might want to use to cut it out.  I changed a couple things along the way (like my sentiment color since I was sad to discover that my hot pink vinyl was not a good match for my paper).”
“I knew I wanted to cut the teeny-tiny bird legs and beaks out of orange vinyl, but they were all one piece with the branch so to get around that I made a duplicate and used my knife to isolate the birds and cut out part of the branch.  I could have cut it all off, but I decide to leave a portion to help me line up my birds just right during assembly.  The following screen shots show the steps I took to do this, deleting the extras portions I didn’t need.”

“I was now ready to cut my birds from the orange vinyl.  To do this I selected the vinyl cut setting from the menu.  With vinyl you have the option to adhere it to your cutting mat like you would cardstock or to insert it directly into your machine.  Personally I like to use my mat and use up small scraps of vinyl (and not mess with changing settings), but for the purpose of today’s tutorial I thought I would share another option. 

When using your vinyl without a mat you need to make sure to uncheck the box next to “cutting mat” within your cutting settings window.”


“If you’re using a Cameo, depending on the width of your vinyl, you will also most likely need to slide the rollers by following the directions on the inside cover of the machine.”


“Also make sure to change your setting from ‘load cutting mat’ to ‘load media’ and hit enter.”


“Change your blade setting to 2 (or in my case I accidentally took a picture of mine set to 3 which also works if your blade is getting dull).”


“After pulling my full-sized vinyl from the machine, I cut around the image to avoid waste and peeled off and threw away the negative portion of the image.”


“I then cut a small piece of transfer paper that was similar in size and peeled it from the glossy paper backing (if you’re thrifty like me, this can be saved and reused though so make sure to keep the backing it comes on to hold onto for another project).”


“Lay the clear transfer paper over your vinyl image (sticky side down) and rub with the popsicle stick it comes with (or bone folder or stylus).”


“Peel back the transfer paper and your image should now be clinging to the clear transfer paper.  If not you can help it along by rubbing stubborn areas again or sticking a fingernail in there to encourage it.”


“Now you are ready to adhere it to your actual project.  Once again your rub-it with your popsicle stick or stylus (and once again you repeat as necessary or stick a fingernail in between the transfer paper and your vinyl cutout to help it along).” 


“When images are not fragile or easily warped in their shape it’s possible to skip the transfer paper all together, but I personally love the transfer paper because it helps me line it up perfectly every time just the way it was on my computer screen.” 🙂


“I repeated these same steps to cut out the sentiment “love you” on my card.  With the small size I chose, this was even more fragile than the bird legs and would have been nearly impossible to do with any material other than vinyl.  I completed my card with more cute papers from the Here & Now collection.”


To create my card today I used the following cutting files designed by Lori Whitlock:

“For all those new Silhouette owners out there I hope I’ve taught you something new and for everyone else, I hope I’ve managed to inspire you to play with vinyl more and give it a try for your next intricate cutting project!”

If you’re interested in giving vinyl a try we have a super promotion going on right now!

You can BUY ONE GET ONE FREE on all Silhouette vinyl now through August 14! Here are the two deals you can cash in on…

(1)    Silhouette CAMEO®, 2 rolls of vinyl (chalkboard and white) and 1 roll of transfer paper: $269.99
(2)    Buy one get one free deals on all Silhouette vinyl (including transfer paper and stencil vinyl, too)

Be sure to shop using this link: www.silhouetteamerica.com/vinyl and use the coupon code LORI at checkout.

Are you ready for ANOTHER freebie? TODAY ONLY we have another FREE shape for you! This saying from Kolette Hall is perfect for cutting out of vinyl! Just incase you were not aware, Kolette Hall offers her SVG shapes in our online shop along with her Commercial use licenses for her SVG and Silhouette cutting files. Thank you, Kolette for sharing this beautiful FREEBIE today!

EXPIRED

Just a reminder… ALL SVG cutting files and fonts in Lori’s Shop are on sale, use coupon code SUMMER to get 30% OFF your entire order!

Be sure you ENTER TO WIN the Silhouette Cameo that we’re giving away!! The winner will be announced on Monday!

THANK YOU for joining our Blog Party this week! It’s been fun having you here with us! I thoroughly appreciate your support! My goal is to bring outstanding cutting files, paper, fabric, etc. to you! Just knowing that you enjoy working with the things I’m designing keeps me going! Thank you!

Silhouette Tutorial Filling Shapes with Digital Prints by Brigit

Hi everyone Brigit here with another SSDE Tutorial.  I love to fill my shapes with digital paper and then do a print n cut with my Silhouette Cameo.  It does such an awesome job cutting out the pattern filled shapes as you can see in the card below.

For this project I used one of the cards from the Christmas Card Set 2 and Lori’s digital paper collection Sweet Life.  I only used the card and the two front layers, you can delete the other pieces.

If you need help with ungrouping and making compound paths check out my tutorial here.

I do not import my digital paper into SSDE, I have it all organized by designer in a folder on my computer.  You can see in the photo how I have the folder opened onthe right-hand side next to my program.

I just dragged the pattern paper from the folder and dropped it into the shape.

Notice on the card the owl design is to the left and cutoff.

Select the card, go to the Fill Pattern and Advanced Options, click on the Pan Pattern, a circle with crosshairs will appear in the middle of the card, click on it and move the paper around.

I wanted my owl on the opposite side with the white swirls to the right so I clicked on the Horizontally under the Mirror Pattern.

I line up the card fronts so when panning I can see exactly where I’d like the owl to be.  I used the Scale Pattern and enlarged the paper to 110% so the edge of the paper wouldn’t show.  The scale pattern is great to make your pattern paper designs larger or smaller I use it all the time.

Lori has a cute owl and tree cut file that matches this collection in the owls set, I used the eyedropper under the Fill Color and selected colors from the collection so everything would match or you can fill them also with the digital paper.  The sentiment is an element from the Sweet Life collection, to cut that out you need to first do a trace, that will be covered in another tutorial.

All my pieces fit on one 12″ x 12″ piece of cardstock, registration is checked under the Registration Marks and I make sure all my cuts are selected under the Cut Style.  Now I’m ready to do a print n cut.

Other Supplies Used: AC White Textured Cardstock, In the Navy Trendy Twine, Brads

Thanks for stopping by, I hope this tutorial has helped!!  You can visit me at http://www.brigitsscraps.com.

Silhouette Knife Tutorial

Hi friends!  I’m excited to share a sweet card and tutorial with you today!
I recently went on vacation and had my son’s fiancé stay at my house with my dogs.  I decided to make a thank you card for her, and wanted the dogs on the card to resemble my pups.  I love Lori’s cute dog cutting file, but one of my dogs has a shorter tail, and one has shorter ears…so here is what I did to fix this.
1. First I pulled up the dog shape I wanted to use.  I resized and ungrouped all of the pieces and slid the shapes that I didn’t want to use right away, over to the side.
2.  Next, I highlighted my dog and duplicated the shape.  Since one of my dogs is smaller, I resized one, and flipped her around so that they weren’t facing the same way.
3.   Before I cut my shapes, I zoomed in on them so that I could see the cut lines better.
4.  I used the knife tool along the left hand tool bar.   I clicked on the line to start my cut…and then clicked on the line where I wanted my cut to end (notice the first dog’s tail).
5.  I did the same step for cutting the second dog’s ears to make them shorter.
Once the cut line was created, I used the ‘move tool’ (top arrow) and then clicked on the pieces to move them off to the slide.
6.  The photo below shows where I have used the knife tool to cut one dog’s tail and the other dog’s ears to make them look like my adorable pups 🙂
7.  Since I don’t want my dogs’ tail and ears to be square, I used the “edit point” (second arrow with dots) tool to round these areas out.  If you click this tool, you can pull your points around into the shape you want.
8.  This shot shows how one of the ears has been rounded.
9.  Here is the final way my sweet dogs looked before I cut them out…
And here is the card I created with my new shapes.
Lori Whitlock cutting files used on this project:
Thanks for visiting Lori’s site today!  Please pop over to my blog at Artsy Albums to say hello!

Silhouette Tutorial Subtract Feature by Corri

Hi everyone!  I have a quick tutorial for you today with a couple of examples of how to use the subtract feature in Silhouette Studio.

In my first example, I used the subtract feature to cut down this ticket border for the ice cream card I did a couple of weeks ago.

To trim down the border, use the rectangle tool to draw a rectangle around the tickets you want to delete.

Then click on the modify menu along the top and select subtract. 

To separate the two layers, right click and pull down to release compound path.

Now you have two layers.  I cut them in different colors and stamped my sentiment on the top layer.

For my second example, I made a simple cut out card using one of the hearts from Lori’s 11 hearts set.

I created a rectangle that was 5.25″h x 4″ and placed the heart along the edge.  Select both objects and go to the modify menu and click on subtract.

I created another rectangle at 5.375 x 4.125 to adhere behind the heart.

I cut one of these banner labels for my sentiment.

I embellished my simple card with some gem stickers, a button and some burlap string.

Thanks so much for stopping by!  You can see more of my projects on my blog.

Silhouette Tutorial Welding Shapes by Christine

If there is one thing that I love about digital die cuts, it’s that you can have fun manipulating them to make something very different than they might have been intended for.  I took one of Lori’s 4×6 Life Card files and made a mini album from it.  I only used one of the shapes but using the directions that I am going to give you, it will be very possible to make a mini book with different shaped pages.
Here is the file that I used.  Once I had my shape on my mat, I actually resized it to a 3×4 size for a mini, mini album, but you can create it in any size that you would like.
Here are some pictures of my finished mini book.  I used Lori Whitlock’s Here & Now for Echo Park paper and embellishment collection to create my mini book.  I’ll have more up close pictures of my mini on my blog if you want to pop on over there.
So now for the tutorial.  How do you take a 4×6 Life card and make it into this ticket shaped accordion mini album?  Let me show you!
Pick the shape that you want to use.  I picked the ticket stye.  Ungroup the file and delete the shapes that you don’t want to use for this project.  Replicate your shape so that you have a row of three.
Move each shape to the left so that they are just barely overlapping.  You don’t want to go too far because it will distort the shape.  You will know when you weld the shapes together you will know if you put them close enough because the middle lines will disappear.
If you move over too much or not enough, just click the undo button and try again.
Tip:  Hold down the shift key while you are drawing your line, to get a perfect straight line.
This step can be done whether you have the basic or Designer Edition of the Silhouette Software.
Sorry, the above direction should say, Copy one of the perforated lines and paste it on the end of the welded shape where you just erased the line.  Draw a short angled line, select it and mirror left under the replicate feature.
Cut out as many of these groupings to make your mini book long or short.
Try this technique with basic shapes or more complicated shapes.  You never know what you can make until you try.
To create the mats for the individual pages of my mini book, I took one of the original shapes and used the inside offset feature.  Those I cut out separately from matching paper.
I hope you enjoyed the tutorial today.  If you have any questions please feel free to visit my blog and leave your question in the comment section.  Thanks!!
Supplies used:
Here & Now paper and embellishment collection by Lori Whitlock for Echo Park