Using Your Silhouette Cameo Vinyl on Stained Artwork

In a few days I will be sharing my Industrial basement playroom. When I had the room mostly complete, I realized it needed one more thing. 

I had a lot of 12x24 in boards laying around, So I decided to stain one, and create some fabulous artwork for the playroom. 

I love the contrast between stained wood and paint, so decided to bring out my Silhouette Cameo and create a fun playroom appropriate saying. 

I quickly quickly realized applying vinyl from a Silhouette is nearly impossible on stained wood if you do not spend a lot of time wiping extra stain from your board, which I never did!!! So this was a much harder project than it needed to be!! (Doesn't it always seem to be like that, something that should be simple always finds a way to be extra difficult.)

I love my finished result. I think it looks great in my industrial playroom!! And now I know how to stain a board and use vinyl from your silhouette!!

See more of my projects using stencils I made with my Cameo.

See more of my projects using my Cameo.

Silhouette Craft Fail

I don't have a lot of craft fails with my Silhouette Cameo when I use paper.... but this time that was not the case... This was my fault in that I did not press the paper down enough onto the craft mat. One more run in and my project cut just fine!

Not my night!

Tonight has just been one crafting fail after another!!

I still have a love HATE relationship with my Silhouette Cameo. It has a mind of its own, and I am thinking that is how its going to be. I have learned tonight not to cut vinyl with very skinny letters and expect to stencil with them... ... my word became a jumbled mess. Most of the time I can't get the transfer paper to work and am finding it works better to NOT use it.... but again that's a hit or a miss....


My fault - not the Silhouette's fault - but I removed the portion I wanted to keep instead of the stuff I didn't want to keep... I am saving this, it might come in handy in the future, but it's not going to work for what I want it too now...

You can't really tell in this picture but I can't even sew a straight curved line right!

Then to top it off, I got paint on my laptop!

Tomorrow it will all work out and I am sure I can salvage most of these projects, but isn't it frustrating when it seems like none of your brilliant ideas want to work out the way they should???

My first Silhouette Project!!!

Last week I promised my finished first silhouette project. It was so much more difficult than I thought it would be. I follow lots of bloggers who frequently post about their Silhouette so I thought it would be easy and fast to use. While I do still really like my Cameo, it just is a lot harder to use than I thoguht it would be!

So I cut on vinly the saying "Have yourself a merry little Christmas" to paint onto a canvas board. This part was the most fustrating part, but I finally was able to cut the saying out of a couple cutting sessions...

I transfered the vinyl onto the transfer paper. This part seemed easy enough...





And the vinyl did stay attached to the transfer paper!



Rubbing it back onto my surface was a bit harder than I thought it would be. I had to use the tool to hold the vinyl onto the canvas board to get it to stay down as I pulled the transfer paper back.



After the very slow process, I was finally able to align all of the letters onto the canvas board. It looks so pretty like this, I maybe should have just left it like this!!


I made two copies of this canvas. The second time I used the white back ground paint to paint over the letters first to try and take care of any seepage... it didn't help.... and actally worked better on my first version... of well! I used Martha Stewart paints and the sponge brush.




Loving the first part of the canvas!




Onto the second part!



Red glitter paint for the word "little" from the Martha Stewart line. The glitter paint was a little hard to paint over the green paint, but the sponge seemed to help, and after 3 coats we had a nice finished product.




The finished product!! I am very happy with how it turned out! I thought it would be easier than it really was, but I can't wait for my next project.

Cutting Vinyl with the Silhouette Cameo

I was so excited, I ordered my very first cutting machine on Black Friday from Silhouette. I got the Cameo at a nice discounted Black Friday price! I was so excited for it to arrive because of all of the fabulous projects I saw out in blogland that I could not wait to try!!

Once it arrived I was sort of at a stand still, what would be my first project?? So many things to make, so little time, and to be honest the machine was a bit intimidating! And I am a crafty (previously worked for a major Crafting company), creative AND computer literate person! (I have a minor in Computer Science - little known, un-shared, nerdy fact about me!!)

I have now used my Silhouette Cameo a few times, so I am by no means an expert, and I still have no clue what would be a GOOD first timer project... Maybe printing some nice Holiday gift tags or something nice and easy with cardstock, because the manual you get with your Cameo does a nice job of explaining how to cut with cardstock. But I decided my first project would be to make a canvas vinyl board, because lets be honest that's why you get the Silhouette Cameo or any cutting machine in the first place!!!

I decided with help from my sister to make a board with the saying "Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas". I designed it in Silhouette Studio (the easy part, and again pretty detailed in the start up manual information.

Then came the hard part, cutting the vinyl. I think I now have it all figured out, but it took WAY too much time, that I don't have with a toddler running around the house!

Setting up the Silhouette

First a huge step I missed for the longest time: Adjusting the Rollers for Smaller Media. I figured I was cutting 12" vinyl, I did not have to do any adjusting, but yes you do. The machine comes set up for cutting 13" to adjust for the extra inch on the cutting mat! So refer to page 8 of the Getting started with your silhouette Cameo to see how to do this.

Loading the vinyl takes a bit of adjusting because I always seem to get it bunched up a bit, so I have found starting with a straight cut helps. Line the vinyl up to the rollers and on your control panel of your Cameo use the arrow to select down to Load Media. Then hit the enter key on your Cameo. Make sure the vinyl is straight within the rollers as well.

Then follow the directions on cutting with your machine within the silhouette studio and HOPEFULLY it should cut your vinyl! Make sure to un-select cutting mat so it adjusts for the lack of thickness of the cutting mat. It says to use a blade thickness of 1, but I found 2 works better. I was having trouble with my blade not cutting well so maybe now that the new one is broken in a bit I will switch it back to 1 to see if it still works well.

Even after I thought I had this all figured out it still doesn't work perfectly. I was cutting a longer saying, and half way through it just stopped cutting it. I am not sure why but I finally got my saying cut after a few tries.

In my several communications to Silhouette I suggested they revise their printed materials that are included with the machine. So hopefully they listen to my suggestion, because this was really frustrating to figure out! They were very helpful, but I feel that if I am trying to do something that my product is advertised to do and I need to call the help line to figure out how to do it, there is a problem.

Like I said not an expert, and maybe I should have become an expert on cutting paper before trying vinyl... I cringe to think about how much fun cutting fabric or other different media is going to be!! But hopefully this can help someone else not waste and entire new role of vinyl trying to figure this out!!!

I am still working on the finishing touches of my first Silhouette Cameo project and will post it when it is finished!

Was this helpful, did I miss something important?

A FEW MORE THINGS - Added Feb. 1

So I have had my Cameo for 2 months now, and I am still by no means an expert!! I still have had times where I completely messed up my project using vinyl.

A few things I have learned:

1. Go and buy some contact paper from the store. I bought a clear roll from Target for something like 5 bucks. I just recently did this, and should have a while ago since so far I have only used vinyl as a stencil and throw it away. The contact paper has worked just as well and is much cheaper!! NOTE: make sure to put the right side up when you cut it, I didn't the first time and had to do another round of cutting! Opps...
2. Buy Freezer Paper! I still have not done this, but its supposed to work really well as a stencil on fabric! I have used vinyl on fabric before. The first time it worked REALLY well. The second time not so well... Google the Freezer Paper idea and check it out. AGAIN a money saver and you are not wasting your expensive vinyl.
3. Don't try and cut a "skinny" font! I tried to cut a very fancy, scroll font and it tore the entire thing. Maybe there is a way to cut a thin scroll font with vinyl... but I have yet to figure that out... and again wasted some precious vinyl!
4. Smaller sections work better than one large section. Pretty self explanatory!
5. Sometimes the transfer paper just doesn't help!! I am starting to find that if you are using the vinyl as a stencil it almost works better to not use the transfer paper and to just lift the vinyl from the backing and re-position it by hand on your background. Be careful not too stick the pieces together... and again the smaller sections work better.

That's all I have for now.... here's to fabulous projects with the Silhouette Cameo!

See all of the projects I have made using my Silhouette Cameo here.