A Few Silhouette Basics

From the Silhoutte Blog...

I started by selecting the rounded square shape on the left-hand toolbar. The great thing about the rounded square is that you can use the right red toggle square to drag and create the "roundness" of your square or rectangle in this case.

Now that I have the shape I am looking for, I want to add the letter A to the top of it, her name starts with an A and really at this stage of life i remember loving anything and everything that was had a monogram or my name spelled out, so I thought this would be a fun accent. Select your text button also on the left-hand toolbar. Click on your project space and type the initial. Here I am using one of my fave fonts Good Vibrations, you of course can use anyone you want.

I then resized it to fit the top a little better and overlapped it on the rectangle, I will end up welding it to the rectangle later. I did not make it the full width because here I am wanting to create a mat around the initial. In order to do this, select your text/initial and on the upper right-hand toolbar you will see the offset button. Click on it and then click on offset and drag the slider bar to the offset dimension you want to see. When you have it right where you want it, click apply. You can always resize your offset and font if it does fit on the rectangle like you want it.

Ok now that you have it ready, select the offset and then right-click. You will see the option to release compound path. You will do this so that you can keep the offset holes for the initial. Next select the offset outline and the round rectangle and click the modify button you will see in the upper right-hand toolbar. Then click the weld button.

Once you have that welded select the offset holes and your new welded shape and right-click and click on group. This way you can move your shape around and keep all its little pieces together!


Ok, now I want to add another little detail. I really like the bottom of the card shape: card_C20090727125838_19414. So I will import it from my library. Ungroup this shape so that the flourish design and the card are separate. You also want to group the flourish design to itself so that you don't loose all the little details. As you can see I rotated it to use its shape on the right side of the bookmark. Using the slice tool from the left-hand toolbar I start a little above the shape and drag it just a little below the shape. If you want to have a perfectly straight slice, hold the shift button while you drag the slice tool.

From here delete the excess sliced shape. Now place the new sliced shape in the position you want it. I have rotated the flourish design to fit the sliced shape. I want to offset the sliced shape a little because it is the exact curve of the flourish design. So select the sliced shape and the offset button and then offset as instructed above. Move or delete the old sliced shape. Then select the new offset sliced shape and the welded rectangle and go up to the modify button and select weld.

You should now have your bookmark shape. Here I have moved my original inital A and the flourish design off. Here are the pieces you will cut. I used cardstock for the base of my book mark and then cut the details out using the Silhouette Smooth Heat Transfer in Lemon Yellow. You can also see from the picture that I added a few Metallic rhinestone details and created a mat using the offset button to add a little more weight to the bookmark. Whew, that was a lot of info, but once you get these steps down you will be customizing stuff like a pro!