Vinyl All the Things (Silhouette 101 Video Class)

Welcome, I'm Kelly Wayman for Silhouette and I'm here to show you everything you need to know about

vinyl

. First, let's talk about what

vinyl

is. Vinyl is a thin, self-adhesive, plastic-like material that you can cut to your

silhouette

and then. Apply to a variety of surfaces. Silhouette vinyl usually comes in 9 or 12 inch rolls and there are many different types of vinyl. Comes in matte vinyl. Glossy vinyl matte vinyl has a more temporary hold, making it easy to remove from the surfaces you apply it to. Malossi vinyl is what you would use outdoors, like on a mailbox or door, because it has a stronger adhesive and a more permanent hold, but you can also use gloss vinyl indoors for projects where you want that shiny, slippery surface or if you need a stronger hold.

There are other types of vinyl as well, you have reflective metallic slate, slate, glow in the dark carbon fiber, you even have printable vinyl sheets, really easy to use vinyls and there are some basic tools that you will use when using vinyl, so, Of course, you will use a

silhouette

machine and the cameo portrait and curiosity can cut vinyl. You'll also use a hook tool to remove any extra parts you don't need once you've cut them out. transfer tape to pick up the vinyl after you've removed it, so you can keep everything in place and not have to place

things

by hand.

You will use a scraper tool to apply the vinyl to the surface and get a really good grip. and then of course you'll use a silhouette blade, whether it's the automatic blade, the ratchet blade, or whatever type of blade works for vinyl. You can cut the vinyl directly from the roll or you can use a cutting mat if you use a cutter. mat, that's good if you have small pieces of vinyl or something that fits completely on the mat, if you want to cut from the roll you can feed it directly into your machine or you may want to use the roll feeder to keep everything stable.

Now let's talk. about what designs are appropriate for cutting with vinyl vinyl is great for cutting intricate shapes because it is not a light, fibrous paper and has an adhesive backing so you can cut metallic vinyl phrases and

things

with a lot of small pieces because I used their tape transfer to apply all those pieces at once and you won't have to worry about losing anything. You can also cut layers of vinyl so you can have multiple colors of vinyl all in the same design. Vinyl is also great for cutting large designs. Because you can use the full length of a roll and if you are using a cameo, you can cut the full 12 inch width and then you can also cut the full length of the roll, you probably won't need to cut a roll that large. a project most of the time, but you can.

I mentioned weeding with the hook tool earlier, so let me explain what weeding is. Weeding is the process of simply removing materials that you don't need, so in this design I'm just taking I removed the background and centers of the letters, so on a small design like this I was able to remove the background in one go, but if If you have a large design, it is helpful to have cut lines that divide your design into sections so you can remove it. Remove small pieces at a time and that way the large pieces don't stick to the design and stick to it.

Let me show you how to create weed lines in the software if you don't have the commercial edition of Silhouette Studio. You're going to need to create your own weed lines, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my drawing tools and my line tools and I'm going to draw a rectangle around this top word. We want to make sure that none of these weed lines touch the design so that it doesn't get cut. Now in this bottom section of this design, it's difficult to capture the entire design in a rectangle, so I'm going to use my line drawing tool.

Instead, I'll drag a polygon line tool and bend. -Click to finish it and that way I won't touch the design, but I have separated this design into sections now. If you have the Business Edition, let me show you how it will create weed lines for you. Weed setups are here with two. letters inside a dashed line and I'm just going to select recursive. You have options that allow you to choose horizontal or vertical and recursive will actually give you the most wheat lines. These weed lines look for spaces between your design to create these weeds. lines for you and remember that if you don't have Business Edition, you can create your own marijuana lines.

Now we are ready to cut this design, so we will go to the submission panel and you will see that there is a preview of the cut. anything that's on a bold red line is going to be cut off, so it's going to cut off both my design and these grass lines. We want to choose gloss vinyl for the material we want it to cut and I'm going to use the automatic blade because I have a cameo 3, but you can choose the ratchet blade if that's what you're using now that we have our settings in the software we want to make a test cut and make sure those settings work for our vinyl, so let me show you how.

To load your vinyl into the machine, the Cameo has adjustable rollers, so if you want to make a 12 inch roll of vinyl, we will need to adjust the rollers, so what we will do is lower the release lever. We're going to move this roller to the unlocked position, slide it into the next slot so we can make a 12 inch roll and put it back in the locked position and pull the release lever up so the rollers don't move. You could feed the roll directly into your machine at this point, but it's good if you have a roll feeder because it will prevent the roll from moving around as you work, so to set up the roll feeder has holes, simply lift the Cameo up. and it will sit on these feet so the roll itself just rests on these rollers here on the roll feeder and you can adjust this bar and I usually roll the front end of my vinyl so it doesn't catch in any slots now.

A really important part when working with vinyl straight from the roll is that you need the front edge to be completely straight, you want it to feed into the rollers evenly and you want them to grip at the same time if it comes off the tracks later if it comes out of the rollers, your vinyl could go in many different directions while cutting and you don't want this to put the vinyl on the wheels of the roll feeder and then your vinyl going up and through this white bar in the front. now we're going to line up the edge of the vinyl with the arrows and make sure it grips those rollers evenly and press the load and once it's loaded you just want to make sure the vinyl is straight so now we're going to do a test cut.

Back in the software, just click the test button, we will download it and look at our test kit. We want it to cut all of the vinyl cleanly but not cut through the backing and that works so we are ready to cut our design. As soon as we've uploaded this again, just hit the blue submit button at the bottom. Well, once you've finished the final cut, you can unload it and cut it with a guillotine or you can use the cross cutter on the back of the Cameo or on the roll feeder, so I'll use the arrows and the software to make sure my design is free of the cross cutter slot and to use the cross cutter we will simply hold the vinyl in place.

Place the cross cutter in the slot and just make a quick cut and now we can unload the vinyl. Now that we have cut it with our weeding lines, we are ready to weed it. This is where your hook tool comes in handy, just like when weeding. in a garden, your goal is to take out the things you don't need, so let's remove all the letter centers and the entire background area, leaving only the design in place, okay, now this design is just like a sticker giant, it has stickiness on the back and we can use transfer tape to pick it up and apply it to our surface.

Now I'm going to set this big one aside for just a minute and show you how to apply a vinyl design with this little one that we removed earlier with transfer tape, so make sure your surface is clean and dry and it's just going to take transfer tape and make sure Lisa is big, a little bit bigger than your design, press it down onto your design, use your scraper tool, press a little bit and then you can peel it off like this and pull it with the transfer tape or flip it over to let the vinyl stay against the transfer paper and if you're still having trouble you can use your scraper tool and put pressure against it as you peel it off, now we're going to pick it up, we're going to use these grid lines to line it up vertically and I like to press it down in the center first and then move it away from the center so that you don't get bubbles, use your scraper tool again to make sure it is well stuck to your design on your surface, then remove the transfer tape, there is your cute sticker now, yes it has a large design which works great for a small design if you have a large design I like to use the hinge method so basically we are going to create a hinge line with our transfer tape where we will have a curve in the design so we can apply it.

I will show you how. that works, so with the transfer tape I'm just going to fold or cut about an inch off the top of the backing and I cut this transfer tape so it's about the same size as my design, the backing of my Trent. In my design it's fine, so I'm going to fold back about the top inch and use this to line it up against the backing of my design. My final cut and I'll press it down and here's my hinge. I'm just going to pull the backing out from under my transfer tape and smooth it against my design as I go.

I want to try to avoid bubbles. You can use your hands or your scraper tool. Shh, okay, don't use my scraper tool again. rub that on and it will stick very well to the transfer tape. Now I'm going to create a hinge again by folding back around the top inch of the backrest and now I can use this before it's completely uncovered. I can center my design on my surface now if I put it down. Right now I can look at it and observe it and see if I think it looks straight. I think so, so here we go again.

We are going to peel off the backing making sure the vinyl design adheres to the surface. I'm going to go nice and slow, make sure that all of that design transfers and that we don't have any bubbles and if you see little mistakes along the way, it's okay to fix them like it's a big sticker, okay, smooth it right out for Great, you can remove that transfer tape. I expect it to wrinkle a little, but I can smooth it out and be done. Now let's talk about multi-colored layered designs. Some designs look good with multiple colors of vinyl. to show you how to do it using registration marks and we'll do it in the software, okay, we're going to create our own registration marks and I'll do it by making a little X. just create my own letter Okay, now let's create some quick grass lines that I'm just going to use. my line drawing tools to split them up and I'm actually going to adjust the straight line by adding an edit point by double clicking on that existing line and then I can click and create better points so nothing is touching a couple more weed lines and Double click to finish on that one.

I also want to make sure that I have my page setup panel set to the same way as the material I will be working with and therefore I have my page set to a width of three inches. by four inches tall and I'm back to using a twelve by twelve inch cameo, whereas before I didn't use any mat, okay, so we're ready to go to the send panel and this time I'm going to choose Phil action. so I'll just click on the fill tab and this will show all the colors that I have in my design, so it has a gold and this light gray and then it has a colorless and this colorless is my registration marks and my lines of weed, so I want this colorless to be cut every time I send one of these colors to my machine, so I have that box checked and then I'm going to cut the white color that I'm going to cut from the white vinyl, etc.

I have my box checked for that. I don't have my gold marked because I don't want to cut that one yet, so this is going to cut the white and weed lines and the registration marks. Now make sure all your materials show the same thing. I want glossy vinyl and I want the action to be cut on all of these and I want my automatic blade for my tool on these so now we're going to load this up and cut it right so this time we're going to cut our vinyl on a mat because it's a small piece and it's too small for the rollers to grip, so I already adjusted my skate to the tightest positionaway so I can grab my mat and with a mat. you're just going to remove the protective liner and put it away because you want to put that liner back on your mat while you put it away and don't use it and I have my vinyl that matches the size of my page, my software is just three inches by four inches.

I'll just press it against the adhesive mat and we can load it into the machine and cut it this time instead of having the vinyl line the edge. I'm lining up the mat against the edge. the guide line, so hit load and I'm just going to hit send in the software, okay, we'll download this one, just take it off the mat and that's cut out all of my white design plus my weed lines and my registration marks and now to cut. I will load the next color on my mat. I put the mat in the machine again in the software.

I want to leave the light color checked and I'm going to uncheck the white and I'm going to check the box for the gold and now when I hit send I'm just going to cut off the gold with the weed lines and the registration marks okay and you can do that with as many colors as you need. I'm going to check the box for the color you want to cut in that step. I'm going to put my mat aside and we're going to weed them good and I've got the gold that we already made, so now we're going to use These registration marks we created to line them up perfectly, so we're going to get our transfer tape.

I also reduced the size and will start with the top layer first, so if any of your designs overlap, you want whatever you need. be on top of the other layers to be the first layer to go against the transfer tape, okay and I'm actually going to place the design back against the backing so that only my registration marks are there, so if I get my registration marks record exactly where they belong and the rest of the design will be in place, okay, now that's all on one piece of transfer tape, I would just do that with all your layers if you have more to remove our backing and we don't need any more marks. registration because it is not necessary to place them on our surface and we will put them in a phone case.

Remember that slippery surfaces work best, but if you're careful, you can place them on surfaces that are a little less smooth. Wow, now let's talk about applying vinyl to a curved surface. Now, in general, it's best to avoid applying vinyl to a curved surface, but you can do it if you know a few tricks and I'll show you how to do it. Do it, so a lot depends on the design you choose for this snowflake. If I want to apply it to a Christmas ornament, let me show you what would happen if you simply applied a design that was connected on all sides like this piece. of paper has wrinkles, you would get the same thing in your vinyl design if it were connected on the outside, so if you want to apply it to a curve, you will choose a design that is only connected in the center and then has kind of spokes that move from the center so that nothing is connected to the outside.

I'm going to put this on a soft surface to hold it so it doesn't move and I'm going to put my transfer tape on this. design and since the transfer tape is still flat and connected on all sides, I'm going to cut between these areas of the design, this will allow the transfer tape to curve around the surface as we apply it, okay, so the we will remove the backing and as I apply this to my ornament, I'm just going to press down in the center and then smooth it out from that center point. Now when we remove the transfer tape the design stays in place and has been able to wrap around the curved surface, this is how you should choose your design for a really curved curved surface but if you have a mug that is only slightly curved , you can usually find a place with a really small layout or just use the same concept as us.

We're going to use our transfer tape and we're going to put it on our cutout and just to be careful with those curves we're going to put some slices in there, just be careful not to cut into your design and I'm going to pick a spot on my mug that's as flat as I can and again I'm going to apply it to the center, first I'm going to use my grid lines to align it vertically and I'm going to press down on the center and then I'm going to work outwards and that design since it's on. a slight bend, it will curl a little, but you can avoid a lot of problems by placing it on the flattest area possible, if you have a larger design that covers the entire length of a mug.

It is best to choose a mug that has completely straight and flat sides because it will curve this way without any problem, it doesn't have any roundness so what if you have a conical surface like a drink container or a mug like This requires a type special design, so let me show you what happens if I just cut a word straight, go straight and apply it to this conical surface, if I apply it to the center and then smooth it away from the center. it will take the curve of the cup, so you would avoid using a tapered surface, but if you have a commercial addition, there is something called a taper tool that will eliminate the curve and compensate for the curve of your cup, so let's go. in the software and look at that, okay, so I have this word and I want to put it in a little conical pot, a little terracotta pot, and what I have to do is use the conical warp tool, so I'm going to go because I have a business addition, I find the warp panel and I go to the second tab that says conical warp.

I'm going to select my design and choose the selected taper shapes and now all I need to do is enter the dimensions of the pot, so I already have it written on a sticky note on the side, my pot measures 2.75 inches in the top one point six two five at the base is 2.25 inches tall and I want to center it vertically at one inch, so now the design itself has a curve, but when we go to the shipping panel and crop it, that curve it's going to be cut the way we need it to be on the vinyl and then when we apply it, it's going to straighten out against the curve, so I have I trimmed this vinyl that was on the curve with my taper tool and I'm just going to use a very small piece of transfer tape to pick it up and I can apply it to this pot, I just use my vertical line on the grid to align. that up vertically and again I'm going to start in the center and press outward and you would see this a lot more in a longer word, but we're just going to put that there and the transfer tape still curves but the design of the vinyl itself It now has a straight top, which offsets that curve.

Now I have my pâté, my little pots with my vinyl design. There are a couple more things I want to mention when working with curved surfaces or cups. a cup or a curved surface is when you will be much more likely to have bubbles in your design. I mentioned starting from the center and pressing outwards if you just lay it flat that's when you'll have the most chance of getting bubbles so if you ever get bubbles you can just take a pin and make little holes and press them to get rid of the bubbles. bubbles.

Now, another thing with the cups, since they are going to be used and washed. use permanent vinyl, the glossy vinyl, and it will stay much longer. You should probably hand wash them too and let the vinyl sit for at least 24 hours before trying to wash it and that will cure it in the mug and they last much longer so far we have applied vinyl to a variety of surfaces but you can also use vinyl as a stencil to let the vinyl become a mask so you can paint and fill in the areas and block out the parts that you don't I don't want to paint I have a set of painted coasters here and I just painted them white and I want to add a vinyl design to them with paint, like this which I will first show you how to do it in the software. having the final design that I want to cut out to become the colored part is the part that I want to color and paint on my coaster, so I used my rectangle drawing tool and simply created a square around my design. make sure when you are creating a stencil you have an edge that will be cut away and will leave a gap where the vinyl will mask any additional paint, so for this design I only need my square to measure 4 inches by 4 inches because that will cover my entire coaster.

If I had a larger design I could give it an inch on each side for this border and now that I have my vinyl design and my square around it I'm ready to cut this out and use it as a template okay so I cut my vinyl out and removed, so I removed the design that I want to use as a painting, so I left the border out and left everything. These vinyl interior pieces in place, so now I'm going to take my transfer tape and we'll place this on the coaster. Now you can use any color of vinyl.

You can use stenciled vinyl which is obviously made for you. Templates. I just chose a colored vinyl so you can better see what I'm doing. Make sure you don't pick up any pieces as they all stay there on the transfer belt. We'll put this on the coaster and remove just the transfer. tape leaving the vinyl there, okay, now that the transfer tape is off, you want to smooth it out really well with your fingers, you don't want the paint to get under any of these pieces of vinyl, all of those edges need to be pressed firmly against the coaster , okay, now we're going to apply paint to the surface, if you're worried about it seeping underneath, you can use a first coat of the same color as the background paint that you used, but I'm just going to go.

Straight to my color, you can use a foam brush or a stipple brush and you're just going to put a little bit of paint on your brush and make up and down strokes and the paint will only go where it's exposed from the vinyl that has an opening . and the rest of the vinyl acts as a mask to block the rest. This is just acrylic paint I'm using. I painted it with acrylic paint for my base coat, the white and then this is just blue acrylic paint to continue. above now you want to remove the vinyl when the paint is almost dry and as we've dotted this, it's actually a pretty thin layer and we can remove the vinyl immediately so you can see the paint only remains where those openings and the vinyl were.

It was a good mask for the doll. You can use your hook tool, your nails, or a utility knife to remove those intersections. Now we have a set of painted coasters and if you have any flaws you can take a paintbrush and touch them up. up and then you may also want to apply a protective sealant on top. Sometimes you have a very large design that you want to cut with vinyl, but it is larger than you can cut with a 12-inch roll, so you have to cut. We call it patchwork and put it together, so let me show you in the software how to do this.

I have a layout and I want to resize it, so I'm going to go to my scale and make sure it's locked. I'm going to make this 15 inches wide, so as you can see, I have this set up with my page setup panel. I have this set at 12 inches wide which is the width of my vinyl and at 20 inches tall. outside of those edges, so first we need to split this into two parts. I'm going to make this a compound path, so I'm going to go to my modification panel and choose to create a compound path that will ensure that this design is as simple as it can be and it's one piece, one layer, so if you have the basic edition of Silhouette Studio, you can use your knife to cut this design.

In fact, let me back up first, let's create a grass line. This time we will do this a little differently. I'm going to drag some lines from edge to edge for the width of the entire layout and this layout is such that they're going to be too close together to get a vertical and horizontal spaces in there to use my automatic weed lines, so I'm going to draw lines across the width and to make a copy of an existing shape, I'm going to hold down Alt and click and drag that line down, so I'm going to make some quick copies of these lines and show you a trick so you don't cut these shapes.

I'm going to select just the lines and again convert them to a compound path so they're all on one layer and I'm going to send them back so they're behind my text, in fact, I'm going to fill that with color, okay, so I have lines and I have my layout and I want only the lines to exist that are not behind the rest of the layout, so I'm going to select everything, the lines and the layout together, and if I go to subtract everything in my modify panel, that tells me that it will subtract the areas of the shapes that are obscured by other shapes, so the design that is on top will simply remove the lines that are hidden behind them, so at night you subtract all that means that only the lines that are hidden will be shown. are exposed and that you can see, and while I have this selected, If we want to group it, let's go to the shipping panel real quick and just make sure that as we zoom in those lines don't show underneath and it looks like we're fine, if you just have a basic sum, we will use the knife tool. to cut this design so we can cut only one part at a time so we want to make sure we have a straight line and we want to treat it as solid so we'll just pick a spot and dragour knife down and that's going to cut our design in half and we're going to select up to that split point, we're going to make sure we have everything together for this half of the design and we're going to group it if we move it out of the way, you can see that.

We just split our design into two parts, so I'm going to group each one and when you have a design here in the waiting area, that part is not going to be cut, now let me show you how to do this in Business Edition. If you're not using the knife tool, you have an automatic tiling feature, so I'm going to go back to the point before I split them in half, okay, so it'll have a single shape again, so if you have Business Edition, we're going to go to the media layout settings panel, so we have an icon down here with a bunch of triangles and we want to click on the box to show the media layout split screen.

In this first tab we want to make sure that our media matches what we're actually going to cut, so we want a width of twelve inches, we want our height to be 20 and we want our cutting mat to be off, so that will form our design as soon as we tile it to the correct size. our media, click on the tile tab and check the box for active tile and now this will split our layout so we don't have to use the knife tool now if you want to adjust where the tile splits are, that's easy.

To do that, just drag these arrows to make you can actually toggle what we're going to cut by clicking on these boxes, so I want them both to be highlighted in blue, that means it's going to cut them into two separate segments and we're ready to go to the panel. shipment. We'll make sure we have our material set up correctly, which is glossy vinyl. Our action is cut and I'm going to use. the auto blade so after I load my material this will cut the first section when I press send and then wait for me to unload the material and reload a new piece and give me the option to resume when I'm ready to cut the second piece , so let's go ahead and load up our vinyl and we'll send it to the machine.

So we have cut both sections of this large piece of vinyl in two separate passes. Now it is weeded and we are. ready to apply the transfer tape. I'm actually going to place this on my table so it doesn't slide around and I cut my first section of transfer tape the same size, 12 inches wide and a little longer than the design, etc. I'm going to use the same hinge method to apply my transfer tape. I'll fold back just the top. I cover my entire design, so once you have applied the transfer tape to both parts of your design, you will have the option to apply it. all as a single piece of transfer tape with overlapping sections or you can apply it in two separate sections to the wall.

It's whatever is easiest for you. Now we are ready to apply this to the wall. We already have our design cut and the transfer. tape applied. I left a little bit extra on top so I could use it to temporarily put it here on my wall so I could hold it there for a minute and just look at it and see if it's level before I commit the whole thing, so if I like the way it looks and I think I'm going to add some painter's tape to have an extra hinge at the top, so now I'm just going to remove the backing leaving the vinyl on the wall.

Remove the transfer tape from this first section before applying the second section that we cut into the second section. I've cut the backrest a little bit so I can align it with this side and its hinge doesn't always have to be at the top, you can move it from the side and there's also your big design. Thanks for walking me through everything you need to know about vinyl. We hope you have already learned something new. You should know the different types of vinyl. The tools you need. need to weed and create weed lines how to cut vinyl and then how to apply it with transfer tape how to use vinyl as a stencil and how to make mosaics be sure to check out our other resources, like our YouTube

video

s and our blog, and contact our support team if you need it stand in silhouette america calm good luck on your next vinyl project