In our first appointment in the Cut Doctor series, we talked about purchasing materials and choosing the right one in the Send area. I also showed you how to create and save your own custom settings. You can find that lesson here. Now we’re ready for our second appointment about how to choose and use each type of action and how that affects your cuts.
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Think about this lesson like exercise. Which exercises you do affect your body in different ways. Choose the wrong one or do it in the wrong way, and you might hurt rather than help. As the old saying goes, “Actions affect consequences.” Come into my exam room and let me educate you on choosing the right action for your desired result.
What factors affect the Action choice?
First, you want to choose the correct material because that affects what actions you even have in the menu. For example, if you choose Heat Transfer, Smooth, you won’t see the option to choose Sketch as the action. That’s because you don’t normally draw on HTV — you cut it. But as I mentioned in Lesson 1, you can draw the lines with a sketch pen before you cut to make weeding easier.
The second thing to know is that your choices differ based on what machine is connected and detected. Certain actions are only available on a Curio or Cameo 3, so if you have multiple machines you want to make sure the right one is showing at the bottom of the Send area. For more on this topic, see my series Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Send Area.
Why the Action you choose matters
There are several reasons to choose the right action in your Send area.
Tool Choices
Just as the Material choice affects the Action choice, the Action choice affects the Tool choice. The choices you have for the various tools match the action. For example, if you choose Cut as the Action, you won’t see a Sketch Pen as a tool.
The machine works differently
Now why would it matter if you choose to Cut instead of Sketch when using a pen? Don’t you just have to put a pen in instead of a blade to make the machine draw instead of cut?
It does make a big difference. The machine handles a blade differently than a pen, particularly at corners and the starting/ending point. Here, I put a pen in but chose Cut as the action.
And here’s that same file where I chose the Sketch action instead.
See the difference? That’s why you always want to choose the correct action for your design.
How to choose the Action
In Action by: Simple mode, you’ll see the spot for Action right below the one for Material.
The choices in the left column — No Cut, Cut and Cut Edge — are for the cut style, not for the action.
In Action by: Line, Fill or Layer, it’s to the right of the Material column.
As with the Material choice, click the arrow at the end of the word to open the list of possible actions.
When you cut in one of those advanced modes, you can choose different actions for different parts of your design.
The choices for Action
Cut
Choose this to cut all the way through your material, or to do a “kiss cut” on materials like vinyl or HTV. With the latter, you use a setting that’s lower on blade number and/or force so that you don’t cut through the backing. This is your normal, default action for most materials.
Score
Score lowers the blade number and force settings for the chosen material but uses the blade. Use this for cutting only partially through the material so you can fold along the cut line once you remove your material from your mat.
- With an AutoBlade, the machine adjusts the blade for you.
- If you’re using a ratchet blade, you adjust it yourself based on the recommendations you see here when you choose this action.
- The machine adjusts the force based on your settings in the Send area. Don’t worry — later in the series we’ll get to how and when to do that.
If you want to score a fold line and then also cut around the outside of your design on the same pass through the machine, the way you do it depends on the machine you have.
- On a machine with 2 tool holders–
- In Simple mode or in Advanced mode, you can use 1 action for the left tool and a different for the right.
- In Advanced mode, you have even more options because each row (line color, fill color or layer) can have a different action.
- On a machine with 1 tool holder, you do it in Advanced mode by adding a pause between the rows. That allows you to adjust the ratchet blade between the score and the cut.
I prefer to do the Score first.
Another way to create a fold line is to choose a perforated the line in the Line Style panel or Quick Access Toolbar.
Sketch
Use this with a Silhouette sketch pen or your own pen in the pen holder to draw lines instead of cutting them. I used this to address all the envelopes for my daughter’s wedding (you can read about that here).
Emboss (Curio only)
This is for using your fine or wide embossing tool to emboss or deboss your material. Deboss pushes the material down so that the design in recessed. When you want to emboss, you flip the material over and do it from the back. That makes the design in raised on the front. Typically, you will set up Score and Emboss in the Emboss panel. The score action happens first, so that the fibers are broken down enough for the emboss to be more distinct.
In my opinion, the deboss works better. The edges of the designs are more crisp. If you prefer an emboss, check out Kay Hall’s flat embossing technique.
Etch (Curio only)
Use this option for etching on metal sheets or the like. Cindy Pope, a fellow presenter at the All Things Silhouette Conferences, uses this setting for tooling leather on her Curio and gets ASTOUNDING results. We’ll talk more in our next lesson about the stippling/etching tool and what it does.
Stipple (Cameo 3 and Curio only)
Use the stipple panel to turn a design into a series of dots. The machine then draws the dots on paper with a pen (either machine) or punches them on metal sheets with the stippling/etching tool (Curio only).
Up Next
Now that you understand your action choices, we’ll move on to the various types of tools in our next appointment.
If you’d like to see some of these tips in video form, check out my class When Good Cuts Go Bad on Terri Johnson Academy. It’s done in an older version of the software, but the concepts are the same.
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