Best ever hack for paper projects with multiple colors

So I am a confident enough woman to admit that I’m absolutely TERRIBLE at getting elements straight on a paper project (or any project for that matter). It’s okay – I still feel good about myself. But because I know this about myself I’ve created some tricks to help me. Today I want to share one about how to use your sketch pens to make a template to help in aligning multiple elements on the page. I’ll also give you some clever ideas for projects and some money-saving tips. NOTE: This is an intermediate-advanced technique. If you’re a beginner, just know it may be too difficult for you.

Note: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you click the link and purchase something, I receive a small commission. You pay the same price. This helps me to be able to keep my business going and provide more tutorials. I will always be honest about my opinion of any product.

What’s the trick?

I’m going to give you the main idea, then walk you thorough each step with different types of designs.

First, you create a small internal offset of your design.

Next, you load your background piece of paper onto your mat. Replace the blade in the machine with a sketch pen or your own pen in the pen holder and send the job to the machine. The pen will draw out the internal offsets on the paper.

You now have a template on your background page that shows you exactly where to place each piece. Once you cut out all your other pieces, just glue them in place. Because you did an internal offset, the cut pieces will cover the pen lines.

Now that you have the big picture, let’s talk about the details.

Prepping the design

First, if you aren’t used to working with fill colors on all pieces let me highly recommend it. Filled pieces are easy to grab with your mouse because you can click anywhere on the image. With unfilled designs, you’ve got to click right on the line. That’s even more difficult when you have pieces laying on top of one another as we’re going to do.

I recommend using the colors of the papers you are going to use, or similar patterns if you’re going with patterned paper. The red cut line doesn’t show up well on many colors, so change the line colors to black if you need to see them better. That will also help as you create the internal offsets.

Once the pieces are filled, layer up the design on your drawing area just as you would when assembling the project.  Make sure the front to back order is correct. If you filled the pieces as suggested, this is easier. Check your alignment to make sure everything is placed where  you want it and spaced well.

Creating the template

Now we’re going to do the internal offsets. There’s a process to follow so stick with me.

In the offset panel make sure you choose Internal. It doesn’t need to be very much – just a bit will do. How much you need depends on the size of your pen and sometimes your design. Do a couple of tests on scratch paper first if necessary. For me, .020 usually works well.

Different types of designs use different steps so we’re going to go over each individually.

Single piece designs on a background paper

If your design is all 1 piece, you don’t need this hack to assemble various pieces. For example, look at this doily:

It’s all a single piece. I don’t have to worry about getting lots of pieces lined up together on my project.

HINT: If you aren’t sure if your design is a single piece, try filling it with color to visualize better.

I would, however, use it to help me get the piece centered or otherwise placed precisely on my page. Here’s the internal offset template I created for this design:

To make this template, I–

1. Centered my doily on the page.
2. Selected the shape and did an internal offset.
3. Moved the shape to the side so I could see my offset on the background.
4. Made sure my offset pieces were grouped or in a single compound path.
5. Changed the line color of the offset to black.

To create the project, I would–

1. Load my background paper onto the mat.
2. Put my pen in the machine.
3. Sketch the internal offset.
4. Move the offset off the mat area and put the shape on it (or set the offset to No Cut, bring the doliy back over and set it to Cut).
5. Take the background paper off the mat and put on my paper for my doily.
6. Cut the doily and glue it onto the background paper.

Designs with multiple pieces that don’t overlap

This doily is a different story:

Each piece is completely separate — none of the pieces touch or overlap.If you were cutting this with vinyl, you’d be fine because the transfer tape would keep everything together at the correct spacing. But with paper? Holy moly, that would be a nightmare! Each piece would need to go onto the background paper individually. So here’s the template I created, with a few of the pieces already glued on.

This gives me way more bang for my buck when I purchase designs, because it enables me to use them with a wider variety of materials.

Here’s another one.

Even though the base is a shape I would cut, all the other pieces just glue onto that in a single level. None of the pieces overlap. Since there are so many individual letters, it helps to have a pattern to follow when assembling to keep things straight and spaced correctly. Here’s the template (design on left, template on background piece in middle, pieces at right):

And here’s that card in progress:

The process for these is the same as for a single-piece design. You have multiple pieces in your second level, but since they don’t overlap one another you follow the same steps.

IDEA: This is a cool way to make a craft for kids. Create the template, then use sticker paper to do a print and cut for the pieces.  Adhesive-backed cardstock is also an option. Or, with older kids, cut the pieces from regular cardstock and let them loose with the glue.

BONUS

You can use this technique to make 2 projects from 1 cut. If you’re like me, you hate throwing away the tiny bits of paper that are the interior pieces of a design like my first doily. It seems wasteful. The problem is that a bunch of small pieces are hard to assemble. But what if you make a template?

Let’s go back to that single piece doily. I make a copy so I have one to use to create a template and one to cut. To use the castoff pieces from the doily for a second project, I need to keep the doilies the same size. I move one of the doilies out of the way.

Next, I ungroup and release any compound paths to separate the design into pieces.

I delete the background piece because I won’t need that.

I select all the pieces and either group them or make them a compound path. This isn’t absolutely necessary but it keeps me from accidentally moving a piece. It’s also faster for the software and machine to process a single compound path than a myriad of individual pieces. I then follow the same steps to create an internal offset and draw it out on a background paper. Here’s a closeup of the template I created. The blue piece is what would normally be thrown away when I cut the doily.

I sketch the template on my background paper, move it off the mat in the drawing area and cut my single piece doily. Now I can use the template to assemble the castoff pieces on a second project. Here you can see all 3: the doily I would cut (left), the castoff pieces (middle), the template to use those castoff pieces (right).

Stacked designs

A stacked design is one that has a base piece and is several levels high. Each piece is smaller than the one below it. In other words, you don’t have pieces that are partially on the piece just below and then partially on a piece farther down.

Here’s an example of a stacked design. Each letter goes onto a label shape, which goes onto a square, which goes onto a rounded rectangle, which goes onto the card front. When I attach the letter to the label shape, none of the letter hangs over the edge of the label onto the square. That makes it fairly easy to use this technique.

That’s a good thing, because a card like this would normally make me break out in hives. When I use this technique, my life is much easier. You follow the same basic process, but there are more steps. Once you do it a couple of times it will make more sense.

Here are the steps to take to make a template for this project

–Make an internal offset of the topmost piece. For this design, it’s the letters.

–Move the topmost piece (the letter) out of the way. That leaves the offset on the next piece down (my dark pink label).

–The line color of the offset will be the same color as the line of the piece you made it from. That’s how offsets work. Change the line color of the offset to a different color (I’ve used brown). By doing this, you can easily choose which lines to sketch and which to cut when you’re ready to send the project to the machine. To learn more about cutting by line color, see this post.

–Group the internal offset you just made with the next piece down in the order. It’s the shape that the offset is sitting on.

HINT: As you group pieces, they will move in the order to the level of whichever piece is higher. That means some of your other pieces might seem to disappear. Don’t worry — they are just hidden below another piece and changing the order will bring them back to view.

–If you have multiple images in your top level, repeat the process for each shape. I did it for each of my letters.

–Now make an internal offset of the second piece down (my label shapes). Because you grouped the offset you made with this second piece down, the new offset will just be of that second piece. In other words, it won’t make an offset of the first offset. Don’t worry if it looks like it will as you’re making it. As long as you’ve grouped like I said, the new offset will be of only the outer piece, the one on the second level.

–Move that grouped set (the offset of the top piece + the second piece down) out of the way, just as you previously moved the top piece itself away.

–Group that second offset you made with the third piece down in the order (so the label offset and the square).

–Repeat as needed for each shape in the second level.

–Keep following the steps for each level — make an offset of the group, move the group, group the new offset with the piece one level down. You don’t need an offset of the bottom base piece because it’s not going onto anything else. Here’s my final set:

You now have each piece with its own cut line and with an internal offset of the piece that goes on top of it. Cut by line color, sketching the offsets and cutting the pieces. Each piece then shows you just where to place the piece that goes on top of it. Instead of a single template on a background sheet, you have one for each piece.

Here are my pieces sketched, cut and partially assembled:

IDEA: This would be a more challenging project for older kiddos who enjoy crafts. Or what about a teaching game for the classroom, perhaps with magnet paper? The possibilities are endless.

Layered designs

A layered design is one that has pieces in several levels as in a stacked design, but some parts lay on different levels below. The process to make a template on these types of designs is more complex than with a stacked design.

Here, the base is the yellow bottom of the flip flop. The orange strap is attached onto that. The yellow flower center goes on the white one and the white on the pink petals. So far so good.  BUT – when you assemble and put the flower on, only part of it is on the strap. The rest lays on the yellow base.

Following the process I just taught you, the strap with the flower offset would turn out like this:

See how the flower goes outside the strap edge?

So what do I do with that?

There are several options for dealing with this type of result:

• Don’t do an offset of the flower on the strap and eyeball that piece when assembling.
• Create it as in the normal process (like my pic here). Just be aware that when you sketch the template and cut the strap, the pen will draw outside the strap also. You may or may not want to do that, depending on if it takes up too much of the rest of the paper.
• Use your knife, eraser, point editing or Modify options to remove the parts that go beyond the strap. Personally, I hate the knife and eraser. They are slow and clunky. If you know your Modify options, you can use those in many different ways to customize your template. That’s what I personally would use. I promise it will change your Silhouette life completely.

For layered designs, this template hack may or may not be worth the trouble. It depends on the design and on you. Is it something you REALLY want to get perfect, are going to sell, or are going to do multiple times? Do you, like me, struggle with getting things straight? If so, then it’s probably worth it.

Layouts

Here’s another great use for this technique. Let’s say you design a card or scrapbook page in your software using many different elements. Once you cut the pieces it can be hard to get them into just the right spot on the background paper. You can use this technique to create a template that shows you exactly where to put each piece as you assemble the project. That means what you wind up with on your project is exactly what you created in your software.

You don’t have to do it for every element. Sometimes just few reference spots will be enough. For example, on this one I just need to make sure I get the photo mat, paper scraps and photo in the right spots.

(Yes, that’s my beautiful daughter and yes, she’s wearing that dress in the snow on her wedding morning).

So here are the templates I would make for this project (I did this just on simple colors so it’s easier to see).

Notice that for the paper scraps, which are half on the photo mat, half on the background paper, I put the offset with just the background paper. That gives me enough of a reference point. Since each project is different, you’ll need to decide for yourself which placement guides you need to have on your template.

How do you like this hack?

So what do you think about this hack? Was it helpful? Do you have any more tips on using it to create templates? Let me know in the comments below.