Silhouette UK: Dream Big Layout: Creating Stitched Offsets

Hello! Niki here again with a tutorial on creating stitched offsets. I started off by choosing a hot air balloon file from the Design Store. I opened it and it appeared like this.

I enlarged all the pieces and and then wanted to add an outline.

Instead of creating an offset here I simply added the outline shape that came with the cut file around the pieces.

I then dealt with the basket part of the balloon. It was in a few different pieces and I wanted to simplify them a little and weld them all together.

I had to fiddle around with this a little bit, but basically I placed them all on top of each other, and then clicked 'divide'. I was then able to remove the bits I didn't want whilst keeping the outline.

I then wanted to keep the internal stripes solid, but the outline around the whole shape to be a stitched line. So I simply highlighted it and changed the line style to a perforated edge.

With my outline sorted, I could now work on all the middle bits. I wanted to cut each one out of a different coloured paper and create stitch lines within each one. I selected the first stripe, created an internal offset and then changed the offset line to the perforated style. I did this for each stripe. I also grouped each stripe individually together with it's internal offset so I could move them around.

I kept my whole design in tact here and simply copied the stripes. I pasted them to one side for now.

I then removed all solid lines. This is becuase I wanted all stitch perforations to be also cut directly into my background. I was then able to send this design to cut on a white cardstock background sheet.

Moving on to the stripes (together with their perforations) I arranged these onto a new mat in a way that I could cut each from a different coloured paper.

Once everything was cut, I could then stick my hot air balloon stripes in the right place onto my background (carefully lining up the holes) and then add my stitching. I stitched the outline too. The result is fabulous! I love how it turned out.

Thanks so much for checking this out - it's a little complicated but if you love to add stitching to your cut files then give this a go, the results are always stunning.

Happy scrapping xxx