How to add Easy Faux Stitching to HTV

A few years back I made 150 metres of bunting for my friend Linh's wedding.  It was a mammoth task, but looked stunning on the day.  The bunting is now with various of Linh and my friends and families ushering birthdays and brightening bedrooms.

For my niece Elle's birthday, I decided that it would be nice to customise some of this bunting with her name and of course some owls, her favourite animal.  As the bunting is very patterned and colourful, I decided to keep the lettering white, and used contrasting colours for the designs at either end. The lettering needed to be simple and bold to be easily readible, but I thought that it was missing a little something, so decided to add faux-stitching.

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to add this simple and effective technique to your shapes.

What you’ll need:

• Silhouette CAMEO
• Heat Transfer Vinyl (I used flocked)
• Handmade or shop-bought bunting

STEP ONE: Create Lettering

I like to mock up the item I am applying my HTV to, as this lets me size my design correctly.
So I created a triangle 20cm wide and 22cm long to match the size of my bunting pennants

Using the triangle as a guide, I choose the basic and universally free font Tahoma, set to Bold and 300pt.
This will be the stitching line.

STEP TWO: Offset Lettering

Offset the stitching line by 0.3cm to create the outline cut shape.

 

STEP THREE: Change Line Style and Thickness

In the line sytle menu, there are some variations of dashed lines. You may have used these line options to create perferated fold lines for cards. This is what we'll use for the faux-stitching. I opted for the 3rd line in the dropdown menu and set the line thickness to 3.1pt.

STEP FOUR: *Crucial Step* Use Cut Edge Setting

This step the key to making the stitches cut as little losenge shapes and not merely slits. In the Cut Settings menu, select 'Cut Edge' rather than the standard 'Cut' option. Most of the time our lines are 0pt, so both settings work the same. When the line is set to be thicker they operate dfferently - see below which highlights how the two settings differ:

STEP FIVE: Don't forget to mirror your HTV

I've forgotten to do this so many times, normally when I'm in a rush to complete my project, cue sweary words!

The Finished Product

 

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