Using my Silhouette Cameo

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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As soon as September started, it seems like everyone began posting Halloween crafts to Pinterest and and Pumpkin Spice Everything photos to Instagram.

Me? I’m not in that big a hurry to push on to October.

Fall is my favorite season, and I like to enjoy all of it.

A quick craft to start the month were these little owls. They tend to show a lot on Kid Craft blogs, but I’m not sure who decided only kids get to do the easy crafts.

These start with toilet paper rolls. Most of the instructions called for painting them with brown paint, but I rolled brown construction paper around them and glued that on tight. Once dry, I trimmed the top and bottom even with the tube. Crushing in the top forms the ears.

My Silhouette Cameo made quick work of cutting the circles for feathers for the body. I used up some fall colored paper scraps. I drew bigger circles to cut from white paper for the eye parts, and then smaller ones from black paper for the pupils. I set those up to cut with even smaller circles inside to give the eyes more expression – some I did right on center, some I did off center. I cut the triangle beaks with scissors.

A little quick drying tacky glue and three little owls are ready to sit on my entryway table. I’m thinking about doing a similar version but turkey style for Thanksgiving. I may give those guys some legs that stick out so they can hold placecards. I’ll let you know how that goes 🙂 .

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For August, I wanted a garland for my back window that was very cheery. There isn’t really a holiday associated with August, so it’s kind of a free form craft month.

I decided on a hot air balloon garland, and there were a ton of inspirational ideas out there. Most of them used the same folded and glued technique that I used for the Tulip Flowers mobile and the Paper Cactus. There’s nothing wrong with that, except I wanted to do something different.

So I kept looking, and found this super cute hot air balloon mobile. It was designed for a nursery, but nothing about it really screamed “baby” to me. What did stand out was the paper weaving technique, which is something I never had tried before.

And down the rabbit hole I went. This site is full of amazing creations, and the instructions, patterns, downloadable files and videos you need to make them.

I’m not going to lie – this wasn’t really easy. But it wasn’t impossible. It was just really amazing to me to go from these two flower/spider looking things …

To an actual hot air balloon!

There is no way I can explain how to do these better than the site does. Once you get one done the rest are pretty easy, but the learning curve is a little steep. So if you want to create these, I highly recommend you follow their instructions.

I do have a few tips:

1. Watch the videos. before you start assembling. And then do the first one near a device where you can replay bits of the video so you can really see what you are supposed to be doing.
2. Definitely use the paper clips as clamps to keep it all from unraveling as you go.
3. I used tacky glue instead of glue stick for the gluing of that last row. It was easier for me.
4. Consider assembling the basket before you do the weaving of the balloon. Here’s why – the basket is really fussy, and if you give it time to dry between the two parts that need assembly, it goes better. And if you have the baskets done, then adding the balloon on it easy. If you go the other way, if you are like me, you will be impatient to get the balloon finished and rushing the basket assembly means a crushed basket assembly.
5. If you are going to create a garland out of these, poke holes and thread loops into the balloon BEFORE you add on the basket. I nearly cried when I realized that I hadn’t thought that step through and it was very difficult to get the loops in when it was all assembled.

I was really happy with my balloons when there we finished, and I made some quick clouds to go between them on my garland. For this, I did use that fold and glue technique to get the 3D pieces.

First I drew up a simple cloud. And in reality, I didn’t draw anything, I just kept making circles of different sizes until they globbed together to make a cloud shape. These need to be perfectly symmetrical side to side to work, so plan that out as you go.

Using the Pathfinder tool in Illustrator, I welded those together to get my shape, and then exported the file as a DXF format, because the standard version of Silhouette can’t work with an Illustrator file, but it can import the DXF file with no problem.

In Silhouette Studio I duplicated that cloud shape until I had nine on a page (each cloud requires three pieces), and then sent that to cut on some smooth white 80# cover stock.

Once they were cut and weeded, I folded each one in half, and then glued two halves together for each cloud, and let those dry a minute before gluing (and wiggling) in the third folded piece.

Before I added in that last piece, I slid in a loop of dental floss to serve as the hanger for my garland.

Once everything was dry, I strung them all on twine and hung them on my hooks the back window. Since that window faces the sun, it’s impossible to get a decent photo, so the feature shot at the beginning of the post is that garland on my dining room wall.

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I really enjoyed making those paper cactus plants – partly because I like 3-d paper crafting, and partly because it’s hard for me to keep indoor plants alive. I’ll blame the northern exposure of my home (too shady in most windows), but really, it’s me. I’m very likely to over- or under- water plants.

So after I made those two desert dwellers, I decided to go the completely opposite direction and go for something more lush – a fern.

I’ve said it before – I’m just stunned by the availability of free cutting patterns online. Some are better than others, but it’s great to not have to reinvent the wheel every time I start a project. I found my fern file here.

After I downloaded their file, I made a few adjustments. I added a little bit of length to the bottom so I’d have a more substantial “tail” to work with in my final assembly.

After choosing a few variations of green paper from my stash, I sent the first sheet to cut.

After weeding, I discovered a problem. The paper I wanted to use (the only paper stock I have that is green) wasn’t thick enough to bend gracefully like a fern frond. It just flopped over. Not in a cool fern-like way. In a sad, nearly dead plant way. Oh wait – did I just invent a new category of paper plants? 😉

On to plan B – double up the fronds. To get the thickness I wanted and the dimension it would need to look more real, I used two cutouts – one flipped over so the curves matched. I curled the individual leaves using my fingers, being sure to make the two versions be opposite so that I got full dimension from this trick. I used a thick line of glue just down the spine of the fronds, which let the little leaves still be curly, and the combination of the double thick spine plus the heavy glue gave me the bulk I needed for this too look good.

Close up of the doubled up fern fronds with curled leaves.

Assured I had a plan, I sent the rest of my sheets to cut. Toward the end, I resized a few fronds to give the plant a more natural look, making sure to cut pairs of anything I designed.

I switched up the colors of the top and bottom cutouts to give the plant more variation, and bent and glued them as I described above.

For final assembly, I played with the fronds until I found an arrangment that worked, and then used clear packing tape to group them all together at the bottom. I then wrapped a length of floral wire around that a few times, and then dropped that wire down into a toilet paper tube  which I cut a hole in near the bottom. I threaded the end of that wire out through that hole and twisted it so it wouldn’t come free easily. This construction doesn’t really result in a heavily anchored plant – if I was going to put this in a more high traffic area I’d have to rethink this part.

I dropped the whole assembly into a tall pot, and then filled around it with crumpled strips of grocery bag for the “dirt”. I used a few smaller accordian folded strips to cover the toilet paper tube so it isn’t visible.

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