Silhouette UK: This House is Under Elf Surveillance | Layout with Sketch Pens and Stitching

Hey there! Niki back with you today with another scrapbooking layout. We have a house Elf that comes to stay in December and keeps an eye on my children and reports to Santa whether they have been good or not, so our house is definitely under Elf Surveillance!

I saw this cut file in the store and just had to make a layout with it. As usual I had to re-arrange it and make it work for me.

I started off by opening the file on my screen.

I then ungrouped the file. This made most of the pieces separate.

I then reaslised I needed to re-size. I selected the whole file so that when I re-sized, the proportions would stay the same, and re-sized the file so the word 'elf' was the correct size for what I wanted.

I then moved the hat pieces to one side and re-arranged the smaller writing. Some of the words were still grouped together so I had to select them and 'release the compound path'

I then sorted out the hat pieces. I wanted some pieces cut from green paper and some from red paper. I find it much easier to sort out which piece is which by colour coding them on screen. I did this by selecting each piece and going to the 'fill shape' drop down menu on the top left of the screen and choosing a colour for each piece.

I then copied the hat pieces and pasted them onto a new cutting mat. I sorted them by colour and then loaded my cutting mat with corresponding coloured paper. I then send this to Silhouette to cut.

I then went back to my original design. I wanted to sketch the small letters with my sketch pens and stitch the large 'elf' word. I selected 'elf' and went to the drop down line style menu and then selected the third option down - a dashed line. This changed 'elf' to a dashed line style which when cut will provide me with a perfect stitching template.

I then went to the 'send' tab and selected 'this house is under' and selected tool 2 and 'sketch'.

I did the same with 'surveillance'. My design is now ready to cut and sketch. I loaded Tool2 with a black sketch pen and then sent to Silhouette. I love that this machine can cut and sketch at the same time.

Once cut and sketched, I stitched 'elf' using red thread and coloured in the word 'surveillance' with gold ink and made the rest of my layout around the fabulous title.