Weddingbee Blog

Here are Part 1 and Part 2 of my basic tutorial for the Silhouette SD.

Now we’re getting into the reason that I ultimately decided to go with the Silhouette over a Cricut machine: custom shapes! Not only can the Silhouette cut any font on your computer, you can make shapes with it too. At the time I bought it (November!) I didn’t know what custom shapes I might want to make, but I knew I’d want that ability. When we got the first drafts of our invitations, I fell in love with the H <3 P that was on the top of the bookcase, and suddenly we had a wedding ‘logo’. If not a logo, at least a motif! I decided to see if I could make a cut file for that shape.

First I opened a copy of our invite file in Photoshop, and cut it down to just the H <3 P. Then for good measure, I changed the background to white—I’m not sure if doing this made a difference or not, but it made me feel better. Then:

1. I opened Silhouette Studio, clicked File > Open and opened the new little graphic I’d made.

2. Then click on the ‘Trace Shape’ button which is the blue butterfly-ish one at the top. Their website said to hit ‘trace shape’ but gave no clue what it looked like, and it took a long time to find! I put an arrow in so you can see.

3. Now click ‘Select Trace Area’ on the right hand side. Your cursor will change, and now you can draw a box around what you want it to trace.

4. After you’ve drawn the box, click one of the 3 options in the right hand panel—it is easy to experiment here; just click undo if you don’t like the result! To get my outlines, I clicked the middle one, Trace Outer Edge.

5. Now you’ve got a shape! Drag your graphic away, and you can see the nice red cut lines.

Now you’ve got a cut file like all the ones in the Silhouette store, you can resize it up or down, un-group it if you want, put it inside other shapes, anything really! This particular graphic was fairly simple, I probably could have figured out what font it was and just typed it in Silhouette Studio, but I wanted to keep the spacing and everything proportionate.

I’ve only used this file for one project so far, but I’m sure it’ll make more appearances at the wedding. Did you end up with a “logo” for your wedding? Was it on everything?