Today I’m showing a technique that I first played with a few years back. I call it an inlay technique because it reminds me of wood inlay where the surface of the wood is filled with wood or material of a different colour resulting in a contrasting but smooth surface.
This works particularly well with Card stock designs but I see no reason why it couldn’t be duplicated in Vinyl or HTV for a lovely smooth one layered finish in more than one colour. This would be similar to the the knock out effect except you are filling the negative spaces of a design rather than deleting overlapped design parts. I haven’t tried it in materials other than card stock, so that’s what I’m using today for this demo.
How to…
Basically what we’re doing here is, instead of weeding and throwing away the negative parts of a design, we are re-cutting them in different colours to inlay into the design for added colour. The success of this depends on nice clean cuts, so use your best blade and mat.
Select the design you wish to use. Before I start I usually duplicate the design and place a copy off the mat, so if I mess up, I still have a copy of the original file to go back to.
- Cut out the design you wish to use from Cardstock and set it aside. I’m using a small 3 inch folded Gift card with a Rose Design and I cut it from White Cardstock.
- Create and cut a backing for the design. In my case I drew a small square just a smidge smaller than the card but larger than the cut out design. I adhered this to the inside front of the card. You need this so that the inset pieces have something to support them when assembled later. {While it’s not suitable for my sample small card, on a flat design you could offset at this stage for added colour and interest around the edge – see the Gift tag image at the end of the post.}
- Select the whole design and ungroup and/or Release Compound path. Which command you need will depend on how the file you were using was designed in the first place.
- The entire design will be highlighted. Click somewhere off the mat to deselect. Go back and select the outline of the card and the perforated line and delete them
- This will leave the Inside {Rose} design intact and ungrouped.
- Use the Colour Fill bucket to colour in the design. How many colours used depends on how many different colours of cardstock will be used for the inlay. I’m using two shades of pink and two shades of green. The colours don’t have to be an exact match – it’s only a visual guide.
- To cut the pieces out go to > cut settings and use the Advanced Cut options “Cut by fill Colour”. Alternatively the pieces may be cut by just dragging the appropriate colours on and off the Silhouette Studio mat manually as you change the card stock colours in the machine. Either way, position the design at the top left of the mat before cutting to minimise waste.
To Assemble
When all the pieces are cut. Take the original design and adhere the backing piece behind it. Then take all the small pieces and pop a tiny bit of glue on the reverse side and pop them into the negative spaces of the design. I use the Zig glue pens with the very fine nib applicator for this. Here’s the result.
Options
Here’s another example, these are some Gift Tags I made a while back. I cut the entire Gift Tag design 3 times in 3 different colours and then “mixed and matched” the offset backing pieces and the negative pieces that I weeded from each, then inlaid them into the other coloured tags. I didn’t fill every negative space this time, which enabled the contrast backing to show through in places.
If you like the Gift Tag Design I’m sharing the Free cutting File here.
Finally…
I’m working on some kind of index page for all of my tips and Tutorials. That’s coming soon I hope. In the meantime here’s a clickable Graphic and links to the 9 Silhouette Studio Design Tutorials I have up so far ….
1. Name Gift Tags // 2. Make Scalloped Edge Squares // 3. Make Quatrefoil Shapes // 4. Make Feature Words // 5. How to Use Pantone Colours // 6. Personalize Split Baubles // 7. Easy Doily-Rotate Tools // 8. Make an Overlay into a Card // 9. Make 4 designs from 1