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!

Tutorial: Stitching with your Silhouette

I love all the tutorials our Creative Team has been making! It’s fun to learn new things! Check out how easy it is to make faux stitching lines on your die cuts. Take it away Brigit…

I love stitching but sometimes I just don’t have the time to pull out my sewing machine so I’ll create it in Silhouette Studio and do a print & cut.

For this project I used Lori’s Bracket Shaped card and the pinwheel from the Layered Shapes along with Lori’s Patriotic Picnic digital collection, which I love!!

First place your card on the mat and ungroup, fill the top layer with your digital paper.  Select all, go to Line Color and click none.

Select your top layer, go to the Offset Window, select Internal Offset and set your offset distance, I used .075.

Now the internal offset you just created should be selected, go to the Line Color and select the color you want for your stitching.

Next go to the Line Style Window, select your dash line and I like to change my line thickness to 1.25pt.  Check the Print Lines of Selected Shapes box.

This is important, with the stitching still selected go to the Cut Style Window and choose No Cut, you only want the stitching to print and to cut around the top layer piece.

After that’s complete I like to group the top and stitched layers together.

Here’s a closer look, I used the same steps on the pinwheel, you only need to do one of each color and duplicate to make it easier.  I added some stars to the blue to make it look like the American flag.

I loved the pinwheel so much I created a larger one on a barber straw and placed it in a glass jar.  I added some Stars and Stripes Trendy Twine and a couple of flower elements from the Patriotic Picnic collection.

I hope this tutorial has helped and you get to make some faux stitching on your projects too!!