Silhouette UK: Sketch Pens & Water colours

Hey there, Niki here today with a tutorial about sketching and offsetting. I chose a heart background that I already had in my library and opened it up on my mat. What I wanted to acheive was for a design to be sketched with sketch pens and for the shape as a whole to be cut out around the outside edge so that I could then place that onto my layout.

So I probably shouldn't have chosen such a complicated design but I liked the file as a whole so decided to roll with it - I'm a big believer in using the files that I already have to their full advantage so figured I would find a way to make this work. So I began by ungrouping / releasing the compound path of the whole design but that meant that every little tiny stitch line was then an individual file - goodness, what a lot of pieces!

Rather than attempting to delete all the stitch lines, I clicked on the outside edge, held down my shift key and then clicked on all the bits in-between the hearts. Once I was sure I'd got all the bits I needed selected, I simply dragged the selection over to the right of my mat. I then grouped them all together and deleted all the stitched bits that were still on the mat. I then put my outline design back on the mat.

The heart design on the mat is going to be sketched in sketch pens. But I also want to cut te design out, just around the edge, ie I didn't want any of the sections in-between the hearts to be cut out. I selected the design and then went to the Offset menu.

I applied an offset at 0.125 but this gave me an offset for all the in-between pieces too which I didn't want.

I simply picked up the offset and moved it off the mat. I then released the compound path and deleted all the middle bits so I was just left with the outside edge.