In the Craft Room

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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It’s really no secret how much I like owls.

I’ve made them as a group. And I’ve made them small.

As the season changed here in Kansas City, I’ve noticed some really good Fall door decorations, and I saw a large owl that was simple and striking and cute. So I set about to make one out of paper, and quickly got off track.

What should have been a twenty minute project of drawing, cutting and gluing on some eyes developed (in a good way) in a major weekend project of experimenting with making different textures.

My inspiration was this wood and paper craft. I decided I wanted something similar, but entirely out of paper.

First, in Adobe Illustrator, I drew up the body and tree shape so I could play around with sizing.

Once I was set, I exported the head and body as a DXF file, and then opened that file in Silhouette Studio. I separated it into two different cuts, so I could make it taller than the 12″ limit of my cutting mat. I cut it out brown textured paper.

I put the two pieces on a thick piece of corrugated cardboard and traced that. I removed the two loose pieces and then cut the shape with an x-acto knife, since it’s way too thick for my Silhouette. The trick to cutting thick cardboard is to not try and cut it through all at once; just go around several times slicing and poking and sawing until it cuts all through. It’s all going to be covered anyway, so it doesn’t have to be perfect.

For my “feathers,” I set up several grunge textured digital backgrounds in Adobe Illustrator and printed them on thick smooth cover stock. . I had the Silhouette cut many shapes based on the body shape – it’s a smaller version that kind of looks like an acorn. Once they were all cut I tested a couple of arrangements to get a random look. Then I started gluing those on the cardboard from the bottom up, stopping where the the head piece would overlap.

For the head, wings and feet, I cut scalloped pieces from the same paper stock as the head, wings and feet, and then glued them on, overlapping from the bottom to the top. This gave those portions nice texture, and with the extra layers, it created more sturdiness in those pieces.

I cut circles of white and black for the eyes, and a triangle of orange became the beak. I glued the head, wings and feet on top of the cardboard, making sure to overlap the feathers so none of that background showed through.

For the tree branch from the inspiration photoI used a digital wood grain background paper I printed, and I cut leaves of two sizes from two different shades of green paper.

And once everything was all glued up, I created a different way to hang this on my door. I have been punching a hole in a rectangle of a cereal box to use as a picture hanger, but that tends to tip the decoration at a precarious angle.

This time, I cut two rectangles and punched two holes (off center). I threaded a thin piece of wire between them before gluing that down.

Once the glue was completely dry I wrapped the wires together to make loop. This gives me a little more fudge factor when looking for the center balance on the nail on my front door.

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