Design of the Week - Class of 2018 - 29th May 2018

Hello, hello - Karen here with the DOTW.  This week it is a phrase - Class Of 2018 - perfect for those of you who have children at school or who are graduating this year.

My daughter graduated last year and so I was a bit flummuxed as to how I was going to use this design and then I realised that it would be easy to change the 8 to a 7.  I opened the design, ungrouped it and moved the 'class of' to the side of the design area.

I then used the text tool to add a 7 in a font as near to the original as possible.  I stretched it until it was the same height as the 8 and then deleted the 8.

For this design I gave the numbers an external offset to draw with a white sketch pen and cut it from patterned paper.  I gave the 'class of' an internal offset to draw with a blue pen and then cut it from a piece of white card.

 So I had a perfect title for a scrapbook page of my daughter and her friends, the first photo was taken the day they were told they had passed their course and the second was at their graduation.

'Sparkle' Layout with Rhinestones | Niki Rowland

Hey there Silhouette Fans! Niki here with you today with this very fun and pink unicorn layout using the Silhouette Rhinestones. 

I started off by using a Rhinestone template from the store, called 'Rhinestone Unicorn' which is perfectly sized to fit the Silhouette Rhinestones. I positioned the design onto my cutting mat and cut it from white card. I backed the design with another sheet of white card and then set about adding the rhinestones to each of the holes...it took a long time!

I used the Rhinestone Setter to heat set my Rhinestones. I had assorted Rhinestones in 'Clear, Rose & Pink', 'Clear, Champagne and Peach', and 'Clear, Metallic & Black'.

Once I had heat set all the Rhinestones, I added my photo and lots of pink embellishments to the bottom part of my layout. I included a photo of my little girl who is the most glittery, sparkly girl who loves unicorns - any photo of her would have been perfect on this layout!

I also added as many unicorns as I could find and embellished the Rhinestone unicorn with girly, sparkly sayings.

Thank you for joining me today and my super sparkly layout - will you give Rhinestones a go?

Happy scrapping xx 

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Rhinestone Unicorn


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Creating two cards with one Rhinestone cut!

Hi everyone. It's Verity here from Pretty Little Button bringing you another project. Today's project features Rhinestones, and not in the traditional way. I have never used the rhinestone feature before, I am not a rhinestone wearing kinda girl. However, I have seen other crafts use rhinestones and their Silhouette machines to create papercrafts and cards! So I thought why not give it a go and share with you any tips I pick up along the way!

Creating two cards with one Rhinestone cut detail:

The first tip I can give to you is to point in the right direction of the Rhinestone Icon. If you have never used it before, and you don't own a curio, you may think the 'dotted star' icon on the right-hand side is the rhinestone feature. Well, after about 10 minutes of not understanding why I couldn't get the feature to work and then asking for help in the design team facebook group, I noticed that this icon was for the stippling feature which you use on a Curio. As I don't have a Curio I have never used this icon before, and I easily mistook it for the rhinestone feature!

The Rhinestone icon and window, is the faceted rock shape, as seen below:

Ok, now for designing my card. I decided I wanted to go for a simple shape for my first attempt and chose a star. To make my design a little more interesting, and added an additional two offset stars so I could alternate the colour of the rhinestone per star. Once I had all the stars made, to ensure they were still aligned, I used the transform panel and the centre feature - select the crosshairs without a box around them. This centres the selected shapes within themselves. The one with the box around them centres the shapes in the middle of your page. 

When you are ready to turn your design into a rhinestone pattern, select the rhinestone icon from the toolbar. The top section determines your rhinestone effect, as I only wanted the outline of the design, I selected the second from the left. If I wanted to fill the design with rhinestones I would have selected one of the effects from the right. 

The second section relates to rhinestone size. I had a selection of silver 10ss and green 16ss. As I had more silver than green, I decided the most inner and outer stars would be silver - 10ss. 

Once you have selected this, the design will change to circles the size of the rhinestones. You can adjust the spacing, by toggling the arrow if some of the rhinestones are too close together. 

I repeated the above, ensuring the middle star was set to 16ss rhinestones and the outer set to 0ss. If you highlight your whole design once you have converted it into rhinestones, you will see the little counters at the bottom telling you how many of each rhinestone size you have in the design. 

One big important tip, DO NOT RESIZE your design once you have converted it into a rhinestone pattern. These holes are the right size for the rhinestones, if you resize the design it will change the size of the wholes and will be too small or too big when cut. 

Cutting your rhinestone pattern:

Load the rhinestone template on to your mat - this is the back almost flock-like material. Make sure you have your cut settings set to Rhinestone, and test before sending your design to cut. 

Once cut, peel of the template from the backing paper to so you have the negative part free to adhere down to the backing board. You will have lots of little circles left behind on your template backing sheet - don't throw these away, put them to one side! Using a Pick Me Up tool, position a rhinestone in each hole on the backing board template. Once file, cover with a piece of rhinestone transfer tape and burnish down so it picks up all the rhinestones. 

To create the card, place the rhinestones with the transfer tape onto a piece of card. Cover with a piece of baking parchment and apply pressure with a hot iron. keep applying pressure for 10-15 seconds until the transfer tapes peel away without the rhinestones. The rhinestones have heat transfer material on the back and when heat, melt onto the card. 

To finished this card, I added a heat embossed sentiment on a strip of black card and foam mounted the card panel onto a square card base. 

Remeber the piece of backing paper with all the black circles left on it? Well, you can use this 'waste' to create another card. Apply transfer tape over the top, slightly burnishing until the black dots peel up with the transfer tape off the backing sheet. As this template material has an adhesive backing, you don't need to apply any extra adhesive to the circles to adhere to a card. 

Before adhering the circles down, I ink blending some cracked pistachio and lucky clover distress oxides onto a square card panel. I applied the circles down onto the card, burnishing them off the tape. This card was finished with a heat embossed sentiment on a white strip of card. The whole panel was foam mounted onto a square kraft card base. 

If this has inspired you to try this out, please post below. I would love to see it!

Until next time,

Verity




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Sunday's with Steph - Super exciting stencil

Hello! 

So ok my title may have been slightly misleading.....I think it's super exciting 👍👍👍(please bear in mind I am a newbie - ish - Silhouette user so my excitement levels are somewhat easier to please than others!!)

So I chose a confetti stencil from the design store  https://www.silhouettedesignstore.com/view-shape/53505 I used the adhesive stencil material and sent the item to cut while I busied about tidying my craft room.  As it cut quite a few holes beautifully I left the room for it to work it's magic for a few minutes.  I came back and it had slipped under the rollers but only on one side so I quickly stopped the machine and unloaded the material.  Ok so it wasn't what I thought I was going to get but I quite liked the randomness of the circles so I was going to go with it!

I pulled the design from the backing and made the stencil a lot less sticky before popping it on to some shiny card stock and using a pallet knife pulled texture paint across the design.  I removed and re-used the stencil three times with the texture paint before leaving it to drive over night.

I was really pleased with the end result of the stencil and finished layout which came together really quickly (well maybe not the sequins but the rest of it yes!)

I hope you have a great scrappy week!!

Love

Steph x x

You are My Sunshine - Making Re-usable Stencils and Masks

Hello, Janet here with a media I haven't tried before ... Silhouette Stencil Material (the non-adhesive variety). It comes in a pack of six letter-sized, thick, plastic-y sheets. My first thought was that it would be perfect for making stencils to use with some newly acquired glitter paste. I was impressed with the results I thought I'd share the process of making, and using the stencils, together with the finished card.

Design Selection

I chose a stencil design from the Silhouette Design Store by Amanda McGee called Sunburst Mat Stencil. It is designed to be cut as a 12-inch square, but was fine reduced in size to fit my 150 cm (6-inch) square card blanks.

You'll find many more suitable designs in the Silhouette Design Store if you type "stencil" in the search box, and then filter the results by "Regular Cut". The easiest designs to choose are those that already have a box around them, but there are other designs that will work too. Just ensure that the design you choose doesn't have any unconnected interior parts within the design, as those would be lost.


Stencil Design

The designs can easily be converted to stencils by adding a surrounding box if they don't already have one. I made a mini stencil of the centre of the sun by drawing a circle centred on the sun part of the stencil, within a square aligned with the bottom left-hand corner of the stencil. I then selected the circle and the square, and made them into a compound path. In the screenshot below I've arranged both on a US Letter Size page (to match the stencil material).

Cutting the Stencil Material

I found the default setting for "Stencil Material" cut well. I initially tried a test cut with reduced force, but in the case of this material, the default setting was better.  A sticky mat is important with the force this high so I added some additional painter's tape around two edges of the sheet as my mat had started to lose some of it's sticky.

The pieces cut beautifully with a single cut. The slight milkiness of the sheet made it easy to locate and remove the waste pieces from the mat.  The waste from the smaller stencil can be retained to use as a mask.

Using the Stencil Material

I cut a card panel in watercolour paper to fit the interior width of the stencil, then adhered the stencil to the paper on the back with low-tac painter's tape. Then I added some more tape to top and bottom on the front of the stencil.

I mixed pigment ink with my glitter texture paste in two yellow shades. I spread the lighter colour around the outer edge, and the darker shade to the centre. The thickness of the stencil allowed an even, but shallow layer of paste to be spread on the surface. I removed the stencil while the paste was still wet, and cleaned it right away.

Once the paste had dried, I used the little circle stencil to add a centre to the sun. The proportion of ink to glitter paste was greater than previously, and gave a more opaque look.

Once the paste had completely dried I trimmed the panel and it was ready to be added to the card blank.

Cleaning the Stencils

The paste is best wiped off the stencils right away. Any residue can be removed using soapy water and a nail brush. Once dried with kitchen paper they are as good as new, and ready to re-use.


Finishing the card

To finish off the card I printed the 'You Are My Sunshine' Phrase onto vellum. I made an extra couple of lines using the existing words and some letters from the ED George Font, by the same artist, Emily Dyer.  The font is not a perfect match, but it was close enough.

Then I simply added clouds from another file, and some hearts in various sizes copied from the phrase.

I loved using the stencil material and have all kinds of other projects in mind both for this stencil and for others. I urge you to try it out with glitter paste, mousse, texture paste, or sprays and mists.  Do let us know how you get on.


Bye for now,

  Crafting Quine Blog | Instagram @CraftingQuine

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