Hey there Silhouette Fans! Niki back with you today and I'm showing you how to paper-piece a more complicated design. I always love the little thumbnails that are shown in the store and think, great, what a fab layout they will make, but then I download them and open them on my screen and they look like this...eek!
My first instinct is always to immediatly close the design down and do something else! But I now have a method for tackling challenging designs like this and it works every time. So the first thing I did with this design was to ungroup it so that all the pieces were separate.
I then played around to arrange the pieces in the right order. This was I can make sense of what bit is what and I can also start visualising what colours I want to cut each piece in. I knew that I wanted to use a Christmas collection for this layout as the photo was taken just before Christmas. I also knew that lots of the papers in that collection were not solid patterns but white backgrouds with multicoloured patterns such as polka dots and snowflakes. These types of pattern don't work that well with cut out shapes becuase the edges arent defined, so to get around that problem I decided to draw a line around them (internally) with my sketch pens.
At the bottom right of this screen, you can see that I've selecgted one of the presents, gone to the Offset menu, chosen 'Internal Offset' and applied a narrow offset.
I then started to apply colours to the pieces - all the red ones are going to be cut from red paper etc. The colours don't appear or necessarily represent the colour paper I'm going to cut them from, just that they are going to be cut from the same paper. I did this by selecting the pieces, then going up to the Fill drop down menu (top left).
I applied more offsets on the other pieces that were being cut from patterns rather than solid colours.
...and then arranged each colour onto my mat. I then loaded my mat with small pieces of paper. In the 'Send' screen, I had to select the internal offset and set those to 'sketch' with Tool 2 - see screenshots further down for more about this. I then send it to cut and sketch.
I did the red bits next (cut out of glitter card) and the little tiny tags were being cut out of white. These also needed a very tiny internal offset with a black sketch pen to give them definition. I selected them in the same way as the presents and applied a tiny internal offset.
When it came to cut the white tags, I selected all the internal offsets and selected the Sketch option under Tool 2. This turned the internal lines blue which indicated they will be sketched with Tool 2. The external lines remained red, indicating they will be cut with Tool 1. I then sent to the Silhouette which cut them and drew them for me at the same time.
Once all my pieces were cut I began assembling my stack of presents - the fun part!
I also built the rest of my layout to the right of my presents.
I absolutely loved making this layout and think that designs like this make owning a Silhouette soooo worth it - the results that can be achieved just by knowing how to use your machine and make it work for you and the things you want to do are totally awesome!
Make sure you give it a go and don't be too intimidated by those complicated files that look daunting when you first open them up on screen - I promise it's worth a bit of effort!
Happy scrapping xx
DESIGNS USED:
Present Stack
PRODUCTS USED:
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