Let’s get honest here – the reason you probably purchased this machine so you can make and create your own items that typically cost $30-50 on etsy right?! That’s why I did it! And this is the season of Birthday’s in this household! So let’s do some party stuff! Banners are amazingly cute and an easy way to create a “theme feel” in your house or space.
We are having a “kitty” theme for the littlest in my house (1st birthday). So let’s step through how to create a banner.
Materials:
*Silhouette (machine, software, mat)
*Card stock paper (heavy weight, not thin scrap paper)
*string or twine
*Glue/ stick glue/ or glue dots – I prefer glue dots
Select a shape you are wanting your banner to be in – you can choose a traditional “banner shape” – triangle, I am being difficult and selecting a CAT shape – I googled “cat face silhouette” in the browser and found a shape that I liked. Below –
I am doing this personally so I am not worried about copyright (I am not selling these) but if you are worried about copyright, on the google images there is a setting to adjust this – click on setting on the top right side – click on advanced search and this will bring up the below screen – you will want to adjust your search parameters for the highlight field to the setting for “free to use, share or modify even commercially” – this will clear up the grey lines on if an image is usable for you to re-sell.
Back to my image, I right clicked on the image and did a “Save as” and saved the image on my computer. From there I went into silhouette – open a file and open the file you just saved on your computer. This will bring your picture into the studio – the “graininess” of the picture will be an issue when you trace it, so make sure you to NOT have a yellow triangle with a exclamation point in the left corner of your screen – this will say the picture is a low resolution and it will be hard to get a good trace on it (as in creating your image to cut). Just click on the picture and make it smaller (drag the white box in the bottom right corner into the image making it smaller until your yellow triangle disappears):
Now you are ready to Trace your image – On the right hand side – click on the Trace Icon (looks like a butterfly) – Click “select Trace Area” and draw a box around the picture in your studio. It will look similar to the below. Now with this function there are slide bars and you can adjust your trace setting to include more or less of your “color scale”. If it does not look like a good clean line, trace it anyways and see if it comes out ok, Play with your scales to see if you can get a better trace or select a new image. Once you get good you will be able to take a bad trace and adjust it to what you like
Once the Yellow area (this is what is going to trace for you) is what you want, select the trace option you want. I just want the outline because this will be a banner – so I selected “trace outer edge” this will just trace the outline of your image – the “trace” option would trace the outer and inner yellow lines – here are the differences (Trace Outer Edge – top and Trace – bottom): 
Move your picture from the back of what you traced so that you can just see your outline that you will be working with.
So I selected the “Trace outer edge” so that its just the outline for my banner – you will notice with my picture there are little red dots under the cat face – these WILL cut, so I need to erase them, but when you click on them the whole image is selected. So I need to “release” them so they are separate from the image as a whole. To do this you will right click on your image and select “release compound path” or you can select “weld” both items will make every line item separate.
Then I can select all the red dots and click delete on the keyboard and they are gone!
Now I am ready to start planning my banner – first you will want to size your pieces, figure out how much space you have, or what size you would like your letters and go from there. This is one of the hardest parts because it’s all up to you on what size. I am doing several so I measured the space for the first banner – 28 in and I lined them up and fit them in a 28 in box. They were pretty small but being put on a door so not much room. The others I decided I wanted them to be pretty big, so I went with about 5in tall by 7in wide. These will fit my massive space and be very readable.
I bought a book of colors (card stock) from Hobby Lobby. They go on clearance or sale quite a bit, so I paid $5 for this baby! I picked out 6 colors to be the cat faces. I suggest that you COLOR your pieces in the software so that you can see what you need to cut easily.
To do this you will select your items – click the paint pad on the right side of the screen and select your color
I wanted to get a little fancy – and I made triangles for the ears and a heart for the nose – I just hand placed those on my image. If you highlight all items (the face, nose and ears) right click and select “make compound path” it will show like the images I have where the pieces look to be cut out of the design. I also added holes on the right and left side of the cat face so that I had holes to feed my string through – good idea so you don’t have to hand punch holes
Copy and paste your design however many times you need (below I was using “PAWTY TIME” so I have 2 lines, Pawty in the first and time in the second – I just kept my pattern and colored them as I wanted them to be.
Now I took the words I am using and made sure they would fit on the spaces for the faces I sized. I picked a font, typed my word and resized it with the re-sizing boxes (white boxes on the corners when you click on your font after typing and clicking away). You can see below I lined up the letters with the cat faces and sized them right on top. I know the play on words is cheesy but it is a 1 year old party 🙂 and I went with PURRESENTS 🙂
Now that you have sizing on your faces and words, and you have everything colored – you are ready to cut! Load up your mat with the paper. I TAPE down the edges of the card stock because sometimes they tend to lift. Also if you have a large mat, you can put multiple pages on the mat to cut more. Below I have 3 pages on my mat, I was able to cut a few at the same time. Sorry my pic was after I already started pulling the pieces out.
You will use your mat in the program to line up your pieces you want to cut with where your paper is on your mat. So in the example above I had 3 different sections of cut items (my mat is 24 long and I just adjusted my designs where the papers started. So here is what my program looked like when I was ready to cut:
Once you have your items placed and lined up with where your materials are on your mat – you will load your cut mat into your silhouette and send your design to the machine. Click send in the top right corner, use the dropdown under material to select your material – I used the heavy card stock setting and upped my blade to a 6 for the cut depth (the blade in my machine) – I also SLOWED the speed, this helps cut down on tearing.
Once you have your mat ready and your settings are good to go – click send – and wait for all your design to cut. Sometimes when you pull the paper, your inserts will be stuck on the mat, this is ok – you want a deep setting on paper because you don’t want it to tear, so this just means your cut settings are deep enough and mat is sticky enough to hold the pieces that have been cut. Gently peel them off the mat – I suggest bending the mat to release and peel them off so that the paper stays straight and doesn’t wind up bent when you peel them off.
Once they have been cut, continue to load up your machine with paper and continue to cut until all your banner pieces (and words) have been cut out.
Now line up all your pieces – and glue the letters on your banner – Again, I use glue dots – they are easy to work with and you peel and stick them on the back of the items you are gluing.
Once you have all your letters glued on – Thread your String/rope through all your holes for hanging. If you did not add your holes into your design for the silhouette to cut for you, you will have to use a hole punch or something to make your holes:
Once you have it threaded on your string (I used Twine) – you are ready to hang them!! Use tape or pins to attach to the wall 🙂 I made 4 different banners for the party!
Front Door Hang:
Presents Table: 
Main Table: 
“ONE” banner for the highchair:
Hope you have a great party! Banners are fun and time consuming but think on the bright side- you are saving about $20-30 each by making them yourself!
Steph's Lifestyle 