Weddingbee Blog

After all your great comments on my last post about figuring out what our jam labels are going to look like, I thought I’d put together a little tutorial for my marvelous machine. Cinnamon Buns calls it the crazy-cutty-machine.

All the screenshots were taken on my Mac, and I’m using the software that comes with the Silhouette, Silhouette Studio. I actually downloaded the software from their website before my actual machine arrived, so I could play with it…aaand so I could take advantage of the Black Friday shape sale that was going on—I bought most of the shapes in my library for $0.50 instead of $0.99 because of that sale. It’s almost as addicting as the App Store on my iPhone!

Step 1: Open up Silhouette Studio. It opens up with blank page, ready to go! Their default view is landscape, but I prefer working in portrait. You can see the ‘Page Orientation’ choices on the right-hand side. If you’re ever confused as to which menu is open on the side, check up all the little icons running along the top right - one will be bordered in black.

Step 2: Go to your Library (the open book icon on the left-hand side). Pick a shape! The one I picked for our labels is highlighted. Double-click and it opens in your workspace.

Step 3: Ungroup! This shape is a collection of lines that are ‘grouped’ together. I want to be able to edit some of these lines separately, because I don’t want the page definition lines to be cut out, and I don’t want the spine line there at all. Select your shape, right click, and click ‘Ungroup’. Now each line is selected in its own box.

Step 4: Delete! Select the spine line (or whatever else you want to delete). Press delete, and away it goes!

Step 5: No cutty-cutty! Tell it what you want to print, as opposed to cut. We wanted these two page definition lines to print, to make it easier to tell that the shape is a book. I selected the two lines, then went to the ‘Cut Style’ window (it is the little scissor icon). On the right, I then clicked on ‘No Cut’.

Clicking ‘No Cut’ made the lines go a little paler than the others. Yay, not cutting!

Step 6: Make them thicker! I wanted these lines to be more visible, so I clicked on the ‘Line Style’ button (the one with all the black lines, to the left of the scissors) and bumped the thickness up to 0.75pt

Step 7: Make them the right colour! As they were, they would have printed out red. I clicked on ‘Line Colour’ (the one with all the coloured lines, to the left of Line Style) and made them grey.

Step 9: Group up! Now that I’m done editing what the lines look like/do, I grouped everything back together again. Now when I move or resize, everything will move and change together. Select all, right click, and click ‘Group’. It’s the opposite of step #3.

Stay tuned for Part 2: resizing and text!

Any other Silhouette users out there? Any new converts?

P.S.: If you want to see larger versions of any of these images, they can also be found here.