Silhouette UK: 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.