Design of the Week - Play Ball - 28th August 2018

Hello, Karen here with my Wednesday post featuring this weeks DOTW - Play Ball.

As we all know, The Silhouette Design Store is based in the USA and as such many of the designs cater for that market - this being one of them.  As I don't have anyone who plays baseball and subsequently don't have any baseball themed photos I decided to dispense with the ball and just use the title.  I did wonder if the ball was cut from red it could pass for a cricket ball but I don't have any cricket players in the family either.

So I removed the ball from the design and cut the title from Gold Foil to use on a page telling the story of how my dog, Kiera, likes to hunt around the perimeter of the football pitch, after a game, to find stray balls.  Once they are found she will lay on them with her paws curled around the ball to prevent anyone taking them away. 

I added the word 'nicely' to my title and also used gold foil for the photo mat.

As you can see I used my Silhouette to cut the scalloped white card and the double photo mat, also I cut two scalloped strips too.

I added a few stickers and some felt roses (£1.00 bargain from The Range) and wrote my journaling onto a card with a Silhouette sketch pen. 

So what will you be using this design for - perhaps you have a baseballer in your life or a cricketer?

Art Deco Inspired Gift Card Holder - Gold Foil Sticker Sheets

Hi everyone. It's Verity here from Pretty Little Button bringing you another project. Today's project features the printable gold foil sticker paper. Of course, adding foil elements to any of your crafts always steps your work up a notch, foil adds a touch of class don't you think? I used the gold foil sticker sheets combined with dark grey to create this lovely art deco inspired gift card. The floral design of the gift card isn't really art deco as such, but I think the colours really are!

Art Deco Inspired Gift Card Holder details: 

Load the rose petal gift card design into your design space and resize accordingly. I would resize before you ungroup the objects, to ensure they stay in ratio with one another. To create the gold frame detail, select one of the flap shapes that are separate from the cardholder base. Using the offset panel, select the internal offset. 

This will create an internal offset of the shape, however, in order to get a frame, we need to do a double offset. Selecting only the internal offset you have just created, repeat creating an internal offset using the offset panel. 

You will now have 3 shapes inside one another, gradually getting smaller. In the picture below, the purple is the original shape, which we can move out the way as we no longer need it. Group the two remaining shapes together. 

Repeat this for the remaining flap pieces and for the internal rectangle piece on the design.  Make sure you turn your page size in the page setup window to Letter - this is the size of the gold foil sticker sheets. This way you know where to place the pieces on the mat. To reduce the amount of waste when cutting, use the 'Nesting' feature. Highlight all the shapes and select the nest.

This will align the shapes and next to them close to one another so they will still cut separately but reduced about of waste foil in between.  

If you also included the floral design when nesting, it will nest the floral shape but it doesn't use the waste foil from our framed shapes. 

Instead, just manually move the florals inside one of the frames, as we know we don't need the negative space inside the frames.

When you are ready, load the Gold foil sticker sheet onto your mat and into your machine. Select 'Foil, Printable' in the material drop-down list in the cut window. Make sure you do a test cut first! Don't forget to the cut out the gift card base out of black or dark grey card. 

To assemble, fold over at the score lines. Remove the foil frames from the sticker sheet and adhere to the corresponding flap. Make sure you burnish this down to ensure it sticks well. To adhere the floral shape correctly, remove the negative outline - as we placed this inside a frame, you should a small rectangle you can pull away with the negative of the floral. Very lightly position this on the gift card holder, where you wish to place the floral. 

You can now use the negative outline, to add in the positive shapes, allowing you to assemble the floral whilst maintaining the shape.

Art Deco Inspired Gift Card Holder Photos:

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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Rose petal card invitation set by Jamie Cripps, Design ID #49502


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3D picture of a golden illuminated letter

I have been looking at examples of Illuminated letters recently, as used in old manuscripts by monks. The detailed work and the gilding can be absolutely beautiful, so that got me thinking about doing something similar with my Silhouette.

An illumination is an embellishment, or additional decoration that enhances the pages of a written, or manuscript page. The term, Illumination comes from the term Illuminate, or to fill with light. This effect is achieved with the application of gold leaf to the letters and images, which reflect light and appear to glow.

The tutorial that follows I would class as advanced, not because the techniques are hard, but it is a little complicated! I will try to be as clear as possible.

EQUIPMENT:

Silhouette Cameo
Colour printer
Font Times New Roman
Ikea Ribba 25 x 25 cm frame,with 12 x 12 cm centre, or a similar frame
Gold mirror card
Background paper of your choice
Silhouette double adhesive
Gold foil (available on Ebay or Amazon)
Damask pattern by Rivka Williams #39099

STEP 1
Preparing the frame:
Cut a square of background paper to go behind the mount. I used a fairly neutral background with a slight pattern from my stash. My gold mirror card was not quite wide enough to cover all the mounting board so I simply made it as wide as I could and cut a 12.5 x 12.5 cm square from the centre with my Cameo. I stuck the background to the back of the mount and the gold mirror card to the front.

STEP 2
Preparing the letters:
I wanted to do something Peacock inspired, so using the Text tool I typed a "P" and selected the classic Times New Roman for the font. The topmost letter I will call layer one, going down to layer four that is next the background.

• Layer one was sized 15 x 7.5 cm. Select layer one and make an outer offset of 0.25. This is layer two. Move layer two to the side. 
• With layer two selected, do the same again. Make an outer offset of 0.25. This is layer three. Move layer three to the side. 
• With layer three selected, do the same again. Make an outer offset of 0.25. This is layer four. Move layer four to the side. 

Layer 1 - Pattern layer

* Select layer one and make an offset of 0.2. 

N.B. If you are going to use a pattern or colour fill, it is a good idea to apply the pattern to the offset so that if the Cameo miss-cuts just a fraction, you don't see white card. See below where I failed to do this. The first two letters are imperfect and have an annoying white area at some of the cuts. The third letter cut well, but time and supplies were wasted.

Selecting the Offset shape, fill it with the damask pattern which is black and white. With the outer shape still selected, go to Shader effects/Tint. Play with the sliders to see what colours you can achieve. As I was using some royal blue Guinea fowl feathers, I made my letter a royal blue by selecting Red -100 Green -57 Blue 0.

Now importantly, you do not want this "outer letter" to cut, so select No cut for it. Check that the "inner" letter still has a Cut line!

Layers 2 & 3 - coloured layers

Repeat these steps from * for letter layers two and three that you made in "Preparing the letters". Instead of filling with a pattern, simply fill with a colour of your choice. I used a purple and a teal. Notice that each layer is slightly bigger if you have cut everything correctly.

Layer 4 - Gold layer

I cut layer four from white card stock and then cut the same shape from Silhouette double adhesive. Peeling off one layer from the double sided adhesive, I stuck it to the front of the layer four letter. I then placed the sticky side down on the foil and rubbed hard on both the back and the front of the letter to get good foil adhesion. It worked really well!

STEP 3

Constructing the 3D letter.

Cut and stick sticky foam pads to the back of the thinnest letter and carefully stick layer one to layer two. Do the same for all four layers, sticking the final gold layer onto the background of your picture.

STEP 4

Embellishments.

This is the fun part, and totally up to you. I was determined to use up some bits and bobs that have been hanging around for ages, so I stuck on some beautifully coloured Guinea fowl feathers, made some swirls from coloured craft wire and stuck them on with my glue gun. Some sticky gems finished the bling. I am so pleased with how this turned out. I hope you have fun with it too!

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May All Your Dreams Come True - Scrapbook Page Using Printable Gold Foil

Hello, Karen here with a tutorial about how I used printable gold foil for the first time.  One of the things I love about being on the Silhouette UK DT is that I get sent so many different types of product to try, ones I would not normally chose to buy, but as a result would definitely buy in future.

What you will need:

• White Card
• Gold Gel Pen
• Printable Gold Foil
• Silhouette Pen Holders
• Silhouette Cameo.

Step One - Preparing the drawn part of the design.

• This was a very easy process.  I chose a dream catcher design from the Silhouette Design Store and placed it in the centre of my page and resized it to 11 ins tall.

• As I didn't want the section that looks like a piece of leather hanging down from the circle, under the MODIFY menu I chose RELEASE, deleated the pieces I didn't want, selected all the pieces again and under the MODIFY menu chose MAKE.  

• With my design selected, under the REPLICATE menu I used the DUPLICATE LEFT and DUPLICATE RIGHT options to make three dream catchers.  The ones on either side of the centre I resized to 7ins tall and arranged on my page.

• As I wanted a border around my page I drew a 11.5in box and another 11.3ins and centred them on my page.

• The final part of this step is to put the gel pen into the appropriate sized pen holder, replace your blade with the pen holder, choose the appropriate settings and send it to the Silhouette, this will draw your design rather than cut it. 

Step Two - Printing the foil.

• Open the file 'May All Your Dreams Come True' , in a letter sized page, and under the line style window change the line thickness to 5.  Resize the design to 5.5 ins high. 

• Open the feather design and ungroup.  Delete the plain feather and fill the patterned one with black.

• Change the lines to 'NO CUT' under the the CUT SETTINGS Menu and resize to 3.5 ins high. Use the OFFSET option under the OBJECTS menu to add a border, making sure the offset line is set to cut in the CUT SETTINGS.  Add registration marks to the page and add another five feathers and your title.  

• To print this successfully onto my gold foil I added white stickers to the areas where the registration marks were going to print before printing.
• Print and then cut your designs and add to your layout. 

I can't wait to use the foil again as it cut so beautifully and was such an effective addition to my scrapbook page. 

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