Batty Chandelier

This craft is kind of a full circle for me with this artwork.

Last fall, I printed these bats on heavy cover stock, and cut them out with actual scissors for several nights while watching television. This was before I had heard of the Silhouette. The bats were larger, and I was making a garland for my back window. It was slow going, and my hand was getting sore but I really like to decorate that back window, so I kept going.

On one of the nights, on one of the shopping channels*, they were having a craft event, and they were demonstrating a cutting machine. It wasn’t the Silhouette, but I thought that this was something I really might want.

Even Mr. SuzerSpace quickly realized that it would be super helpful for my crafting.

“Call them and order it” he said. “No, it’s too expensive” I replied.

I’m not good at spending money on myself. But seeing that thing in action stuck with me, and by the weekend, I had Googled all the machines and all the reviews and pondered all the Amazon bundles and made a decision.

And so that was the last garland I cut by hand.

For this year, I wanted to make tiny bats to hang from a light fixture I have in my dining room. I never would have attempted this with just hand cutting – too tiny and too many were needed.

But the Silhouette? Easy peasy. It’s a simple Print and Cut project, although I amped it up by double side printing my bats so they could be viewed at all angles.

The steps are simple –

Set up your artwork in the drawing program you like.

 

Import it into Silhouette Studio.

Either trace the artwork with an offset, or import a dxf file for the cutting lines.

Turn on the registration marks

SAVE YOUR FILE. You will thank me for including this as an actual step. If you don’t save your file, and you get distracted opening and closing windows, and close it without saving after you have printed but before you have cut, you will be sad.

Print the file. There’s an icon for that:

In my case, I then flipped the sheets over and printed a mirror of the image to get the second side. This can be fussy depending on your printer, and you need them to line up to each other very closely to work.

Put a printed sheet on the mat, being sure to have the little registration square in the upper left of the mat, just like the screen for cutting shows it.

Set up the cutting specs for your paper, and send the job to cut. Repeat for all the sheets you need.

 

For final assembly, I threaded silver thread between the loops and then made bigger loops of thread to tie them on to my light fixture.

As with many of my crafts, it’s hard to get a good final picture, but you’ll have to trust me, this looks great in my dining room.

If you’d like to make these yourself, click here to download the Silhouette file.

*We watch the shopping channels sometimes like the characters Waldorf and Statler from the Muppets – we heckle the presenters the entire time. It’s good fun 🙂

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