Making Doilies in Silhouette Studio

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It's been a while since I've done a Silhouette project... Have been busy with the boys (Moby started solids last week - yikes! time is flying!!!) and enjoying the last weeks of summer...

I've been crazy about fonts lately, such neat ones people have been coming up with... I came across this  awesome dingbat font at Clever Someday and decided to give it a try! Loved it!!!

I made these doilies in, say... less than 5 minutes and I'll show you how (you don't even need the Designer Edition for this)!

After you download the font at Clever Someday, restart Silhouette Studio (in case you already had it open, just to make sure that the new font loads in Silhouette).

Start the text and use the new font you just downloaded. Next, type a row of "I" (capital i  - to get the flower). Like this:

Resize it to however large you want the flowers to be and draw a circle.

Next double click on your text and you will see a little cross at the lower left corner. You will want to drag that to your circle and it should look something like this:

Now adjust the character spacing, make sure the flowers overlap each other slightly. If you don't have enough flowers, like me, just type a few more "I"s.

You will get to a point where even if you add more flowers your circle won't close up - know what I mean? Something like this:

That is when you have to adjust your circle, so click on the circle and make it little larger or smaller until you get the look you want. You may need to go back to the character spacing in the text and tweak it. Remember you need to make sure all the flowers overlap each other AND that your circle of flowers is closed. The first is controlled by the character spacing (you need to double click on the text of flowers to tweak this) and the later is controlled by the size of your circle. Here is what I got:

Now draw another circle that will overlap your flowers. Select the circle and flowers and use the ALIGN tool, to center the circle in your flower arrangement.

Now this is my favorite part - it's like magic - ready? Select everything you've got and WELD! Ta-da...

OK not perfect yet, I see a bunch of little "things" that I don't like. No problem, here's what we'll do. Right-click your image and select "release compound path". Now zoom in, so you can see all the little cuts that you don't really want. Just clean it up by deleting all the extra cuts you don't want and now you are ready to sent it to your Silhouette!

And now it's ready! Select everything, right-click and press "make compound path". (this last step isn't really necessary, but it will treat the image with the holes in the right places and will allow you to add color or pattern to your image)

Now one extra tip is to save the shape you just created to your library, that way you have it ready whenever you need it. Click file > save to library > add a title and it will show up in your library under "my own designs".

Hope this was useful, if anything is unclear, or you would like to see any specific Silhouette Studio tutorial leave me a comment and I will try to address it.

Thanks for stopping by!