Silhouette UK: Nutcracker vinyl Christmas Bauble

Thursday 22 November 2018

Nutcracker vinyl Christmas Bauble

Hi everyone, its beginning to feel a lot like Christmas here at the Craft Studio and I was so excited to see this design by a fantastic designer who I love! Samantha at SAS Creative has made a series of these beautiful papercut designs based on the classic story of the Nutcracker and I just couldn't resist making this for you this week.

Materials

A blank flat shaped bauble - these are widely available on the high-street.
Adhesive silver foil
White cardstock
Blue cardstock
Light wood effect vinyl
Dark wood effect vinyl
Blue vinyl
Silhouette cutting machine
Nutcracker bauble design number 275855

Step One

The first step is to open the design in Silhouette Studio. When you open the file all of the layers will be together in the order you need to assemble them in when you make the bauble. Before you ungroup the file you will need to resize the file so that it is the right size to fit into your bauble. To do this measure the diameter of your bauble, then go to the 'transform' menu on the right hand side of the screen then open the 'scale' bar. Make sure that 'ratio' is locked by clicking on the padlock symbol. Then change the size of the design to the same as the diameter of your bauble. Silhouette Studio use inches as a default to make sure you measure your bauble in inches! This will resize all of the layers so that they are the correct size for your bauble. Once you have done this you can ungroup the file and then separate out the layers so you can cut them. Make sure that you do not change the size of any of the layers after this point or they may not fit together properly.

Step two

Now that you have the bauble the right size you will need to cut each layer out. In this design there are seven layers. I took the top layer as the first layer and cut them out of the materials as listed below:

Silver foil
White card
Silver foil
Blue card
Blue vinyl
Dark wood vinyl
Light wood vinyl

I used the wood vinyl cutting settings in Silhouette Studio to cut the vinyl and the cardstock settings for the cardstock. This design has a lot of really beautiful detail and my instinct was to cut it all out of paper or cardstock, but as I needed the design to be cut out at quite a small scale because of the size of my bauble I had to look at other materials. Vinyl and the silver foil are perfect for this type of project as you can get a much more intricate design cut on a much smaller scale that you can get in paper. Because of this I used the vinyl and foil to cut the really complicated layers and the card for the simpler layers. The silver foil was really good for this as it was also very strong and cut very cleanly.

Step three

Once I had cut all of the layers out I layered them starting from the bottom and working upwards. As the vinyl and silver foil are self adhesive I stuck the finished project onto a piece of white card stock and cut round the bauble by using a pair of scissors this was just to give the design some more strength to keep it stable inside the bauble. I then placed the design inside the bauble.