… or how to get even more use out of your digital scrapbooking kits. ;D

Today I want to show you one of my favorite things to do with my Silhouette Cameo – turning a piece of word art or a kit element into a cutting file.

Depending on the “paper” you’re using you can create  lots of different craft projects: stickers, magnets, t-shirts or paper cutouts for your hybrid layouts.

For this tutorial I will use one of the awards ribbon from the “Pony Ride” Collab – if you want to follow along, you can download the .png for the award ribbon here.

Open the .png file in your Silhouette Studio software and open the trace window:

 

 

Click “Select Trace Area” and draw a box around your element. You will see light yellow spots and outlines appearing – these need to be adjusted so the outline is complete. To adjust, use the sliders in the “Trace Settings” box. When you do this more often, you will notice that some elements will not need any adjustments at all, others will need some time and playing around to get them right. Personally I prefer to have a lot of yellow  – a bigger area chosen. Here’s what I picked for the award ribbon:

 

Next click “Trace Outer Edge” to create your cutting lines.

To clean up your cutting lines you might want to move your original .png to the side so you can get  a clear look at the cutting lines. As you can see, my choices did give me the outline of the award, as well as the outlines of the outer areas, so I need to clean it up a little.

Double click the red cutting line to enter the “Point Editing” mode. Double click on one of the small grey squares and click on “delete point” – continue to do so, until only the award outline remains. (If you make a mistake, just hit “CTRL+Z” to undo).

Now you need to line up the award image with the cutting line. Select both, your original file and the outline and open the “Align” window, press “align center” and “align middle” and to line them up (zoom in to make sure they’re perfectly aligned) You can hardly see the red cutting line in this screenshot, because it is the same size as the award element.

Now you have two options – cut your award exactly or add a little “sticker border”. If you want to do the first, skip down to the next step. If you want the sticker border, open the “offset window”, click on “offset” and play with the settings until you have the desired border (higher offset distance = wider border, i.e wider distance between image outline and cutting line). Make sure to delete the original cutting line and to keep only the offset one.

I will continue using the “sticker border” version for this tutorial, because the cut line is easier to see in the screenshots. Select both, the cutting line and the award (use your cursor to draw a box around both of them), and group them (CTRL+G or Menu Object -> Group), so you can resize them without changing the alignment.

Open the “page window” and pick the paper size you will use in your printer.

Then open the “Registration Marks” window, choose “Show Reg Marks” and move your item out of the marked areas of your paper. Click on the little printer icon and print it.

This is what your page will look like (please ignore the bad printing quality, a new printer is on my wish list, lol). The black marks on the paper are what the Cameo will use for guidance to cut in the right place – don’t be alarmed if the grey raster is not printed out, that is correct. Place your paper on your cutting mat and feed it into the Cameo.

Switch to the “Cutting Window” in your software, pick the appropriate cutting settings for your paper and hit “Cut”.  You will notice a difference in the cutting “behavior”  because the Cameo will look for the cutting marks before the actual cutting.

 

Peel your work off the mat and have fun with it. 😀

Here are some project ideas:

  • Use your favorite flowers or other elements from a digital kit on your hybrid layouts.
  • Use journal tags to create name stickers for (school) books or other things.
  • Use fun elements  to create custom sticker sets (maybe with the name added?) for your kids
  • Use the trace and cut only for cutting word art from vinyl to decorate walls or cabinet doors.
  • Use your favorite alpha to create a fridge magnet alpha.
  • Use Heat Transfer Material and embellish clothing or bags.

and last but not least one of my favorites:

Create a landscape background and print it full size on a magnet sheet (use your graphic software and print from there). Then do a trace, print and cut for matching elements (animals, cars, kids, fairies, knights, flowers or go seasonal with Easter bunnies etc ….) and you have a great toy to keep your kids busy during a road trip, waiting at a doctor’s visit or any similar occasion! (If you keep your landscape pretty basic you can use it with different magnet sets ;D )