A New Way to Use Printable Embellishments

I have always wanted to use the cute free printables that I have seen in various places around the internet.  I have pinned tons of them on my crafty board on Pinterest.  The problem is, I have the cutting skills of a kindergartner with closet OCD which would make it impossible to tolerate the little nicks and such that would be left when I attempted to cut said printables out. I FINALLY found a solution to easily cutting out printables in a professional manner.

Earlier this month, Silhouette America introduced the Pixscan mat for their die cut machines.  While I wasn’t the first in line to order this mat, I was really close to that and just last week I received my new mat.  When I initially ordered the mat, I planned to use it the way Silhouette marketed it and cut out my stamped images.  However, as I played around with cutting out stamps, I realized that this same technology to cut out many other things, like printables.

For this experiment, I decided to find travel printables to help me embellish the pages of the many pictures we took while in Europe this summer.  A quick internet search lead me to this cute set from Creating Keepsakes.

When I received my mat, I went through the set up procedures to use my mat.  You can find those on page 35 of the Help manual found inside Silhouette Studio.  Because I use an iPhone 5s, I did not have to go through the complete calibration procedures.  However, should you purchase a mat, there are now a growing number of tutorials and videos to help you with that process. For this process, I simply took a picture using my camera phone (shoot straight down on it in even lighting) and emailed it to myself.

Once you have your image saved to your computer, open silhouette studio up and open the pixscan tab (3^rd tab from the left at the top).  Import the image into silhouette studio by simply selecting import from file in the pixscan window.

At this point, the file is treated as a standard print and cut.  Follow the basic trace functions to add cut lines to your image.

Load the pixscan mat into the silhouette and cut as usual.  The machine will automatically detect the registration marks on the mat and cut out the images traced.  I found it better to trace each image separately.  For two of these printable images, I tweaked them until I liked the end cut result by using a standard square shape and an offset.

Here is a layout that I made using my new embellishments.  I LOVE how my printable embellishments turned out.  I am now about to start a completely new pin board just for free printables!

Supplies used: Patterned Paper and cardstock die cut-Authentique; Cardstock-Recollections; Printable-Creating Keepsakes; Cutting Machine, cut file and Pixscan Mat-Silhouette America; Veneer-Studio Calico;Bling-Basic Grey.

I hope this short demonstration inspires you to give printable embellishments a try.  The add an entirely new dimension to scrapbook embellishments