A Different Kind Of Print And Cut Christmas Card

Over at the Silhouette Plus Forum one of the members Ted shared his gorgeous card he had made by scanning a stamped image and then after tracing the image welding it to a rectangle. That got me to thinking about the possibility of using a print and cut. It was a little more trickier as you can not just weld a print and cut to a shape. LOL! Although you can try and see what interesting file you might end up. It took me a bit of playing around but I figured out how to do it. I'm sure there is probably a better way to do this. LOL! I always seem to do things the hard way.

Here is my card. Drum roll please!

The background is DCWV glitter paper. It is a pain to cut as I always have to double cut in order to get it to cut all the way through. Since I have four 12x12 pads of it though I want to use it up so for simple shapes it will work. I edged my print and cut with Forest Green ink I just love the little extra dimension edging with ink seems to give.

For those who want to  know how to do the print and cut the directions are below. I hope they make sense. If anyone has an easier way to do this feel free to let me know by leaving a comment.

I decided to take the Santa Bugs Bunny print and cut file which I bought last year during Black Friday. The first step is to take the image you want to use and release the compound path. Then separate the cut line image from the print image. The cut line image is the one that you will weld to your rectangle or whatever other shape you want to use.

You will want the print image to have a transparent background but if using a Studio file you can't just take it into Photo Shop or another graphic program to make the background transparent. This is where the snip tool comes in handy.(By the way this is free software in some of the windows versions. But if you don't have it there are snipping programs available for free.) Snip the image and I use the copy image option in the snipping program. Then I open in Photo Shop a new image from clipboard. I use in Photo Shop the Magic Extractor to extract just the image which leaves a transparent background. Then save the image as a png.

Now I don't know if this worked because I released compound lines on the welded image to delete a small section that I didn't want to cut or not. So you may have to use the release compound path before dragging your png image over where you want it. But I was able to drag my saved  png image just to where the shape should be without it filling in the rectangle. I did have to tweak the size a little bit and play so that the cutting lines would be correct when it was cut. Make sure the cutting lines are turned off on your print image as you don't want it to cut out the edges. You only want the welded shape to cut.

 In your rectangle or whatever shape you used you can add text like I did. And group everything and then using registering marks print and cut like normal.

This really is not as complicated as it may sound. LOL! It took me longer to figure out how to do it than to really do it.

Thank you for stopping by and do come back. I've been playing with a metal stencil this week but alas the results are not as good as I was hoping for. My practice piece of using Gesso and the stencil turned out beautifully but then when I went to do it over a misted piece of card stock it was a disaster. I painted twinkle glitter paint over the practice piece and will be using it in a card as well as finishing some Christmas cards I had started while visiting my sister.

Wishing you Happy Frugal Crafting till we meet again!