Fear of Nodes!

Working with nodes and the node tool in Silhouette Studio should not be something to avoid. I usually can get very good traces but even then the tracing is never really accurate when you zoom in close and check out places, especially corners. I will admit to be somewhat picky and I always take maybe an extra ten or fifteen minutes after tracing, or sometimes not that long, to zoom WAY in and adjust the nodes around my whole object to get the best possible print and cut results.

Usually you can get a decent trace that you can clean up. However, sometimes an object with a lot of light areas just won't trace well enough to get a usable cut line or it has so many nodes and is distorted enough that it would take hours to clean up the nodes. I will admit that when that happens I normally just take the raster file into Photoshop and work on it there and make a blackout version to trace. I do know that everyone doesn't have Photoshop so there are alternatives, especially when your object is not too complex. Actually you could use the drawing tools in Silhouette Studio to draw around anything, but adjusting the nodes on a complex object would take a whole lot of time.

I got a file from someone on the Yahoo Silhouette Users Group to see what I could do about getting a good trace. Well, I couldn't get one I thought was usable. It was a very simple gable box pattern so I just drew around it and used the node editing tool to clean it up. It seemed a good thing to share how easy this is to do on a simple object so, of course, I felt compelled to do a video...and here it is. Remember if you watch it on YouTube you get a bigger screen.

More on Messing with Fonts

Someone posted on the Silhouette Users Yahoo Group that her knife was not behaving so she was having a great deal of trouble turning a font into a "stencil" font. I had no idea what the knife problem was but I did know another way to make a font into a "stencil" font...therefore another little video to show how easy it can be. After it was done I realized I could have done more of the letters but this is so easy that I don't think it would matter how many letters I showed. Hope you learn something new you can do!

Making Borders with Compound Path Command

Was enjoying reading posts on the Silhouette Users Yahoo group and someone was having some trouble with putting together some "rings" and welding them to make a border. I right away figured it was because the rings were just grouped and had not been made into "compound path" objects. Anyway it seemed another opportunity for a video to show how to make what seems to be a two-part object into a border. Quick and easy to do!!