If you’ve read many of my tutorials, you know I love compound paths. Maybe it’s because when I explain them, I use a donut as an illustration. LOL! Understanding compound paths and how they differ from groupings is KEY to designing and altering … [Read more...]
Simple smile design
Don’t you love it when you teach someone, then they take that information and run with it and become great at doing what you taught them? I do! One of my sisters took my class on the Modify panel at one of the first All Things Silhouette conferences. … [Read more...]
Make your own toilet paper design
So, yes, we are all home a LOT. That means several things, but for my purpose today it means (a) many of us have extra time on our hands and (b) we are using a great deal of toilet paper. Several cute sayings and designs have popped up around using … [Read more...]
How’d they do that? Adding spacing between elements
Today’s tutorial is helpful for those of us, me definitely included, who have trouble lining things up perfectly. By creating an intentional spacing gap between different elements, you give yourself some wiggle room. This is helpful for any material, … [Read more...]
Thanksgiving place cards
We are hosting Thanksgiving this year in our home and I love to decorate for Fall. That includes setting a festive table. I made some quick place cards from standard designs. It's not hard to do, as long as you know a few principles. Once you learn … [Read more...]
Planning and Executing Large Projects: Phase 3 — Sizing, Tweaking and Organizing
This is part 3 of our series on how to do super large projects with your Silhouette. If you haven’t read the first 2 lessons, you’ll want to start here. This time, I’m going to show you how to make your design full size, use Subtract and Subtract All … [Read more...]
How’d they do that? Graduated horizontal spaces
If you know me at all, you know I LOVE LOVE LOVE football. I was watching a game last night and saw a design on the shirts of some of the coaching staff. The team name had graduated horizontal spaces running through the team name. Note: This post … [Read more...]
How’d They Do That? Geometric Designs
One of the current design trends is geometric designs: regular images constructed of a combination of simple triangles or quadrilaterals (4-sided shapes). I thought it would be fun to show you several ways to take one of your regular solid, single … [Read more...]
How to make a stencil
I had a great question recently from a Silhouette user. She was wondering how to make a regular image into a stencil. This is a common question, and it’s easier than you might think. Let’s look at a few different ways to do stencils, from easiest to … [Read more...]
How’d They Do That? Half in, Half Out Logo
I’m one of those folks who looks at signs not only for the information on them, but to check out the fonts and graphics. This past weekend I was in an airport and saw a sign with the logo for Colorado Mountain College. It looks like this: Note: This … [Read more...]
Simple Subtract: An intro to the Modify panel
Recently I was making a birthday gift for my sister. I had an idea in my head from a sign I saw at Hobby Lobby. It’s a pretty common graphic right now — a rooster standing on a pig standing on a cow. Sometimes they have words on each animal like … [Read more...]
Planning and executing large projects: Phase 2 — Designing with the Layer tool
This is the second lesson in my series on how to do very large projects using your Silhouette machine. You can find Phase 1 on setting up the file here. In today’s lesson, I’ll show you how I added my design elements and used the Layer feature … [Read more...]
Modifying this week’s Free Design to fit your project (and fixing some mistakes in it)
This week’s Free Design in the Silhouette Design Store is a great one to teach you some concepts about how to modify a design to fit your project. It also is a teaching tool for how to fix messed up designs. I want to point out the mistakes and show … [Read more...]
Frugal Friday: Making the most of expensive HTV and vinyl material
As I told you in my first Frugal Friday tip, I hate to throw away scraps of expensive or beautiful material. I like to try to find ways to reuse the bits and pieces whenever I can. That’s certainly the case with any patterned adhesive vinyl or HTV. … [Read more...]
Point Editing: taming all those little black dots (Lesson 7)
Here we are in our final lesson on Point Editing. If you need to start at the beginning of this series, go here. In today’s lesson I’m going to give you a few tips on working with points on text, show you how to edit points to help when you’re … [Read more...]