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This craft is kind of a full circle for me with this artwork.

Last fall, I printed these bats on heavy cover stock, and cut them out with actual scissors for several nights while watching television. This was before I had heard of the Silhouette. The bats were larger, and I was making a garland for my back window. It was slow going, and my hand was getting sore but I really like to decorate that back window, so I kept going.

On one of the nights, on one of the shopping channels*, they were having a craft event, and they were demonstrating a cutting machine. It wasn’t the Silhouette, but I thought that this was something I really might want.

Even Mr. SuzerSpace quickly realized that it would be super helpful for my crafting.

“Call them and order it” he said. “No, it’s too expensive” I replied.

I’m not good at spending money on myself. But seeing that thing in action stuck with me, and by the weekend, I had Googled all the machines and all the reviews and pondered all the Amazon bundles and made a decision.

And so that was the last garland I cut by hand.

For this year, I wanted to make tiny bats to hang from a light fixture I have in my dining room. I never would have attempted this with just hand cutting – too tiny and too many were needed.

But the Silhouette? Easy peasy. It’s a simple Print and Cut project, although I amped it up by double side printing my bats so they could be viewed at all angles.

The steps are simple –

Set up your artwork in the drawing program you like.

Import it into Silhouette Studio.

Either trace the artwork with an offset, or import a dxf file for the cutting lines.

Turn on the registration marks

SAVE YOUR FILE. You will thank me for including this as an actual step. If you don’t save your file, and you get distracted opening and closing windows, and close it without saving after you have printed but before you have cut, you will be sad.

Print the file. There’s an icon for that:

In my case, I then flipped the sheets over and printed a mirror of the image to get the second side. This can be fussy depending on your printer, and you need them to line up to each other very closely to work.

Put a printed sheet on the mat, being sure to have the little registration square in the upper left of the mat, just like the screen for cutting shows it.

Set up the cutting specs for your paper, and send the job to cut. Repeat for all the sheets you need.

For final assembly, I threaded silver thread between the loops and then made bigger loops of thread to tie them on to my light fixture.

As with many of my crafts, it’s hard to get a good final picture, but you’ll have to trust me, this looks great in my dining room.

If you’d like to make these yourself, click here to download the Silhouette file.

*We watch the shopping channels sometimes like the characters Waldorf and Statler from the Muppets – we heckle the presenters the entire time. It’s good fun 🙂

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This idea came about when I was working on my Black Capped Chickadee garland. Because of their name, I just kept envisioning those birds wearing a backwards black baseball cap, but I couldn’t quite figure out how I wanted to turn that into a paper craft. Everyone has heard of paper dolls, right? I wanted to make paper birds.

Several weeks later, on our usual morning walk, a neighborhood Robin kept running in front of us, looking back as if we were stalking him.

Side note: Why do birds do that? If I could fly, I would definitely do that instead of running. Although truth be told, I’d rather do just about anything than run 🙂

Mr. SuzerSpace made some comment about us being in the bird’s “hood” (if I remember correctly he flashed some fake gang sign to make me laugh) and now I had two funny (at least to me) bird ideas rolling around in my head, so it was time to act.

In Adobe Illustrator

I like to work in Adobe Illustrator because I’ve used it for years, but this could be done in any drawing program you are comfortable in.

First I browsed around on the internet for a good basic bird shape. I wanted something with very large details, because I was going to set these up kind of like layered paper dolls where the details created the different bird types.

Once I found a couple, I morphed it into something to use as my guide. I can’t really draw anything from scratch, but if I can see the shapes that are used to create something, I can draw them and put them together in Illustrator.

After I drew the basic bird shape, I drew in and colored the pieces that would be needed to turn one into a Red Robin and the other into a Black Capped Chickadee. For that one, I also added a backwards black cap.

Using the Pathfinder tools in Illustrator, I was able to create the cutting files I’d need to make the two birds. I exported this file as a DXF because the basic version of Silhouette Studio can’t use an Adobe Illustrator file, but it has no problem with a DXF format.

In Silhouette Studio

In Silhouette Studio, I set up my Design Page as 12 x 12, cutting with a 12 x 12 Cameo mat.

In reality, I’m going to cut these pieces from 6 x 6 card stock, but this is a neat trick I learned where if you place your artwork on the Design Page grid carefully, and line up the paper to match on the mat, you can cut more than one color at a time.

As you can see from my photo, if you are even more careful with your placement, you can use up scrap paper.

Final Assembly

After I cut all the pieces and weeded them, I layered them and glued them up with a glue stick. I glued each one of those down to a piece of white cover stock that was cut to fit the opening of two frames I already had.

Pro tip: Make artwork the size of standard frames so you don’t have to pretend like you are going to get custom frames made. I say “pretend” because I think most people are like me and while I have good intentions of getting things framed, the truth is if I can’t just grab a frame off the shelf at the craft store or Ikea, it is never going to make it onto the wall.

I’m not a big fan of my own handwriting, so I cut the words for each in black vinyl and adhered that below the bird image.

Once they were assembled I had my own custom bird artwork, perfect for hanging. I have them on my entryway hall, near a big mirror that has my paperclip feet birds perched on it.

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