Cut and Fold with the Silhouette

Today's card makes use of a "cut and fold" pattern by Judy Headrick - found on this website (check it out, she has quite a few nice patterns there).  This one is the pattern she calls "Christmas Snowflake 1".  I traced the pattern with my Silhouette Studio software so I could save myself the pain of cutting it out by hand.  The sentiment was cut out of black adhesive-backed vinyl.  As I've mentioned before, I like to cut a whole sheet at a time with greetings I use often, so they are ready to go when I need them.  The card base is core'dinations cardstock and the black border and embellishments are there partly to cover up the printing on it. (They make their cardstock oversized so they can print along one edge, figuring you'll cut that off -- I didn't. :-))  I also backed the front of the card with black card stock so it shows through the areas where the pattern is folded back.

Unfortunately, tracing the pattern was a bit more work than I would have liked since the trace software drew around each line and would have cut out around each line rather than just cutting along the line.  Here are the steps I took to make it work (I am on a PC - I assume a Mac would work similarly, but there are probably a few differences):

• Create a *.jpg file of one of the patterns (there are several on the page).  You can do this by printing them out and scanning one in, or by taking a "snapshot" (from within adobe reader) of one and importing it into photo software and saving it there.
• Open this file in your Silhouette software.  You will need to change the file selection from "Studio" to "all files" in order to see it and open it.
• Open the trace function by clicking on the icon toward the upper right corner of the screen that looks like a blue rectangle surrounded by a yellow mat. The trace window should open on the right hand side of your screen. 
• Click on "Select trace area" and the click and drag a rectangle around the object you want to trace.
• Then click "Trace Outer Edge".  Now comes the tricky part.
• With the traced image selected click "release compound path" from the "object" menu.
• This breaks the image into separate segments.  Click on one of these and then zoom in enough to see how the red line is drawn AROUND the lines you want to cut. 
• With your segment still selected, go to the set of icons on the left and click the one with an arrow pointing to a dotted line - just below the larger arrow.  This is the "Point Editing Mode" and should show you the line segment with the "nodes" visible. There should also now be a "point editing" window open on the right side of your screen.
• Now, click on the node at one of the ends of your segment. Click "break path" in the point editing window and the node you had selected will spring apart into two end nodes.  Repeat this on the other end of your segment.
• Now you will need to click "release compound path" again (object menu at the top of the screen) to ungroup the two lines. 
• Click on the big arrow icon on the left (the "select" icon) so you can select one of these lines to remove (I removed the smaller inner one). Once it is selected, hit the delete key and it will disappear.
• Select the other line and click on the point editing icon again.  One at a time click on each of the end nodes of the remaining line and drag them into position. (The white box is the node itself and what you will drag.  The blue boxes allow you to change the angle of the curve.  Experiment with them a bit - you can always click the "undo" left pointing arrow at the top of the screen if you don't like what happens!)
• This process will need to be done for each line!  I took what I think is a short-cut and did just one SET of lines, erased the rest, selected the set of lines I had completed and grouped them (click on select icon, drag a box completely around all the lines to select them all, then click "group" from the "object" menu).  Then I made a copy (press ctrl and "c" to copy), and pasted it as many times as I needed to (ctrl and "v" to paste a copy), dragging (select the set by clicking on a line, but NOT on one of the little squares - that will re-size it!) and rotating each one (clicking and dragging the green circle with rotate the image) into place above the picture. You need to be careful to have the set of lines selected when you go to drag and rotate it. It is easy to get the picture below instead (if you do, you can just click the "undo" icon).   When everything is in place you can delete the picture underneath and you should be ready to cut it! 
• I always group everything at the end so it is easy to re-size it to fit whatever project I'm working on.