Silhouette UK: Organise your craft room: Duct tape wire labels!

Monday, 14 May 2018

Organise your craft room: Duct tape wire labels!

Hi everyone. It's Verity here from Pretty Little Button bringing you another project. Have you ever tried the printable duct tape from Silhouette? Well, I hadn't before today, but I was quite surprised with it! It printed really well and I found it very easy to peel off. This will certainly be a useful media to use in the future. My idea for today's project was to organise my craft room more. With these digital machines comes lots of wires which at times can be hard to keep track off. Especially with all your other wires. So I thought why not use the duct tape to create some bright fun labels to keep myself more organised!

Converting a Print & Cut file for Minting details:

Start off by selecting a shape for your label. I saw these lovely Chevron labels in the design store and thought they would make a perfect background. However to make sure my actual label stood out from the background I added a slightly transparent white rectangle behind my label. To do this you need to have your 'Fill' window panel open. To find this, select the paint palette on the right-hand toolbar.

Underneath the colour blocks you will find the transparency slider, if you move this up and down it will change how transparent your block would be. This transparency will allow the underlying shape or patterned to show through depending on what you set it too. I didn't want my block to be a bold white shape so set my transparency to 16% to show the background a little. Once I was happy with my labels, I added an offset around the labels.

One thing you will always find with your Silhouette is that you never stop learning! I recently picked up a Tip from Janette, another design team member on how to alter your print &cut window to prevent too much wastage. In the advanced options, which I have often tinkered with, you can alter the bottom insert. I didn't realise that you can adjust this inset, even more than the slider allows you too, by directly typing in a figure to the right of the slider. This allowed me to create a small print and cut window, just large enough to contain my labels. To see Janet's post on altering Print & cut window, head over HERE.

When you have printed and loaded up your duct tape onto the mat, select the Printable Duct tape from the material list. Make sure you only cut-to-edge so only the offset will cut. As always make sure you do a test cut. The settings were initially set to 20 for the force. When I tested this cut all the way through. I ended up adjusting the force down to 5 for the perfect kiss-cut!