Silhouette UK: Print & Cut Part II

Hi fellow Cameo Crazies, Niki here again today with Print and Cut Part II. When I first got my Cameo two and a half years ago I was blown away by the idea of the Print and Cut feature, but I started off with something very complicated and it all went wrong, which put me off and for ages I didn't use this feature. If you are in a similar position, this is the post for you.

This post is about creating a Print & Cut file, that is NOT from the Silhouette Design Store. In the Design Store, the Print and Cut files are easy peasy as they cut lines are already created for you. But if you've downloaded an image from the internet and want to cut it out, you can, you just need to create the cut lines yourself. And here's how.

So I started off by choosing an image I wanted to print and cut.. It's a flower frame I found on Google. I saved it to my computer then opened it up in Silhouette Studio. I set my Page Settings to A4 Landscape and sized my image to the size I wanted it.

I then went to the Object menu and Trace. I clicked Select Trace Area and drew around my image. I played around with the High Pass Filter, the Threshold and the Scale until I was happy that most of the image was yellow, then I clicked 'Trace'. This created red cut lines. They weren't perfect, but good enough.

Here you can see the red cut lines. They are very intricate and there are lots of little bits witin the design. Cutting like this probably wouldn't give the best result and I like a white outline around my printed designs anyway. I therefore moved the flower image out of the way so I could see the cut lines clearly.

I then went to the Object Menu and selected Offset, which opens up the Offset window on the right. I selected the shape, clicked 'offset', set the distance to 0.100 and applied. This gave me a line around my original cut file.

I then deleted the internal cut file, leaving just the outline, which looks pretty perfect! There were two tiny bits within the lines that I just deleted (I had to release the compound path first).

I put the flower design back within the cut lines and added Registration Marks. I then clicked File, Print to print the page on A4 cardstcok out of my regular printer, then I positioned the printed card onto my silhouette mat in the same position/orientation as I could see on screen, then sent the design to Silhouette. My Cameo then worked it's magic by reading the Registration Marks, then cutting out my design perfectly.