Yesterday I shared with you my
Magna Chalkdoodle and promised that today I would share with you exactly how to make those magnets for yourself.
***Remember that you don’t need a Silhouette to make some magnets. You can still get the magnet paper from Silhouette, then print out your own shapes on your home printer, and cut out the shapes with scissors. A couple of places you can grab some shapes include Microsoft ClipArt and Picnik.***
If you have a
Silhouette, then this tutorial will explain step-by-step how to create the above magnets.
1. First let’s go over the “print and cut” feature that the Silhouette can do. In Silhouette Studio, you need to open up the shapes you would like to use. Right now, I am going to open up the apple, rainbow, and quilt since they are already all set to print and cut.
Go ahead and resize them as desired. Then over in the top right-hand corner, see the button with three black corner marks? Click on it and it will pull up the registration marks menu. Click on the box that says “Show Reg Marks”.
2. Go ahead and print now on your home printer, making sure you load your magnet paper so the images print out on the white side. Here is a copy of one of my printed out sheets. Notice the registration marks in three of the corners.
3. Click on the send to Silhouette button, which will bring up a Print Image menu on the side. Since we’ve already printed, you can click on skip printing.
4. Another menu will come up called “Send to Silhouette”. Follow the steps and load your sheet into your Silhouette and click Continue.
This time a “Cut Menu” comes up and you want to click on “Detect Registrations Marks.”
The Silhouette will run your sheet through and detect the marks, so it knows exactly where to cut. Once a successful detection has been done, set your cutting speed to 3-5 and your thickness to 20-25 and use the yellow cap. Go ahead and cut page and your shapes are cut!
So that’s what you can do if you downloaded print and cut shapes. See the little “P” by the rainbow and quilt? That means those are all set to print and cut. Those were very nice.
However, 23 of my 26 alphabet shapes were not print and cut, so here’s what I had to do.
Open up your desired shape in Silhouette Studio. Leave your reg marks showing so you know what space you are working with. This was my zebra.
Not exactly ready to print yet, huh? So I had to start filling it in with color. Since everything isn’t the same color, we need to ungroup the shape so we can work with the individual parts. In the bottom left corner, click on the “ungroup selected shapes” button.
Then select all the shapes that you want the same color. From the top menu, click on the “fill color” button (the one that looks like a paint bucket), then go ahead and click on the desired color. I chose black.
Notice some lines that are part of the zebra’s smile and the lines around everything we just colored are red? We fix this by clicking on the “line color” button and then clicking on the desired color. Again, I went with black.
Repeat for the remaining shapes. Then move all the pieces around to form your finished shape.
Select everything and group the pieces back together, by clicking on the button in the bottom left-hand corner.
Now that it’s all one shape, we can get it ready to print by adjusting the cut lines. However before I did that, I was a little worried about my young kids tearing those legs off, so I offset my magnet first to make it more of one solid piece. See in this photo the zebra in the bottom right-hand corner? Also notice the jellyfish? Most of them are offset, actually.
We need to click on the “Offset” button in the top right. Go ahead and click on offset in the menu below. You now have a wonky-looking outline around your shape.
To fix this, go into your “Fill Color” menu and select the “No color” box (the one that looks like a chain-linked fence), then I change my “Line Color” to red since that is the standard cut-line color. Then go ahead and resize to the desired outline.
Select both the offset and the picture shape, and group together to form one shape. Now we can adjust our cut lines. Click on the scissors button in the top menu. A lot of bold red lines will show up of everywhere that will be cut. We need to change this so only the outside is cut. Select “cut edge”, and now we are set.
Go ahead and print and cut as usual. Here are the three pages I made.
If you have a monthly subscription, you can get $25 worth of downloads for only $9.99/month. So in one month you could do all but one of these shapes. I would share the files, but I just don’t feel like it’s honest to give them to you guys without you purchasing the shapes. Sorry. However, here is a list of all the shapes I used if that helps.
A- apple_C02586_1
B- beach_ball_C20091102130359_22157
C- toy_car_C00344_23067
D- dog_C20090914105020_2581
E- Elephant_0059
F- chubby_frog_C20090803103417_19007
G- golf_bag_C0011
H- country_house_C00385_19547
I- ice_cream_cone_C00037_28466
J- googly_eyed_jellyfish_C20091026070055_17986
K- kangaroo_C20091124050310_20387
L- ladybug_C00004_30551
M- monkey_C20090817003201_2581
N- bird_nest_C00254_20508
O- animal_owl_C00595_19210
P- Princess_0709
Q- pink_quilt_squares_C20090921235609_19007
R- print__cut_rainbow_C00607_20509
S- sun_C00077_28466
T- train_C00235_20387
U- unicorn_C00600_2581
V- chore_chart_icons_set_1_C00566_19210
W- baby_whale_C00002_30551
X- xylophone_C00072_28466
Y- yoyo_C00073_28466
Z- zebra_zoo_C00428_20508
Phew! That felt like a really long post. Sorry, lots of information there. Hopefully, it makes sense. Please let me know if you have any questions and I would love to see if any of you make some of your own!
What do you think?
