Digital Gingerbread Holiday Garland

As a Photoshop nerd, I believe nothing beats digital “baking” for last minute holiday treats.

And I’m not alone – when I decided I wanted some gingerbread cookie letters for a garland, Google did not disappoint.

Because I’m a do-it-yourself kind of gal, my interest turned mostly to the tutorials. I followed parts of this one which looks like it has a ton of steps, but that’s because they show you how to make the tablecloth and a plate to set them on as well. It’s also a little dated version wise, so if you follow it, be aware that not all the windows will match – the settings are all somewhere, you just have to hunt around a little.

If you aren’t a Photoshop wizard, fear not, because I’m sharing my completed files at the end of this post!

I decided to do a “Happy Holidays” garland made out of gingerbread letters, and the best way to do that is as a Print and Cut in Silhouette Studio.

If you haven’t done a Print and Cut before, the premise is pretty simple –

Create your artwork

Bring it into Silhouette Studio and turn on the magic registration marks in Silhouette Studio

Create your cutlines (I created mine in Adobe Illustrator and exported them as a DXF file to layer them over the artwork, but you can also create them in Silhouette Studio directly.

Print the sheet

Place the sheet on the mat with the registration mark in the correct orientation (the little black square always goes in the upper left corner).

Load the mat, check your cutting settings and send the file to cut.

The Silhouette Cameo 3 has a little laser between the two blade holders, and it reads the registration marks to tell it where to cut.

I have found this to be really very accurate, but to get the best look, it’s best to either extend the image a little beyond the shape (that’s called “bleed” in the printing world) or purposely give yourself a little offset on the cutting path so that a white outline shows all around the shape.

The tutorial I worked from set up individual letters with drop shadows that layered over each other. That was super cute, but not what I wanted. For my gingerbread letters, I made my life easier by making a big slab of “gingerbread” which gave me plenty of room to cut edge to edge on the letters with no white showing.

Once all the letters were cut, I threaded some bright red yarn through them, and hung them across my craft room back window.

If you’d like to make your own garland, and don’t want to step through the Photoshop tutorial, click here to download my two Silhouette Studio files (the phrase takes two 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper, so there are two files to print and cut.)