How to Turn a Silhouette Store Design into a Print and Cut

Did you ever buy a design from the Silhouette Design Store (or maybe download an SVG from somewhere), but instead of cutting it and layering it as vinyl or paper piecing, you want to just do it as a quick and easy print and cut?  It's actually pretty simple to turn designs into print and cuts. I like to do this if I'm short on time or need to make a bunch of something like treat bags for my kiddos' classmates (especially since I know they won't appreciate all the work that goes into piecing haha).

For this example I'm going to use the Flowers in a Bell Jar design which, in my opinion, is one of the best free designs of the week that the Sil Store has ever had. Just saying.

The preview picture in the store shows this adorable little design....

...but when you open it in Silhouette Studio this is what you get....

That's because it's a cut file and not specifically marked as print and cut. But that doesn't mean you can't use it as a print and cut. You totally can..with a little bit of work.

What you want to do is first ungroup all of the pieces so you can fill them in with color.  To ungroup Select design > Right Click > Ungroup.  You may need to ungroup more than once depending on how your design was originally grouped by the designer.

For example you can see that the flowers and the stem are ungrouped from the rest of the design, but not from each other. I need them each to stand alone so I need to ungroup again.  You'll know when everything is ungrouped when each piece has its own box around it.

Now you are going to start filling in each piece of the design with a color by using the fill color tool. If you want it to exactly match the example in the preview you can actually do a screen grab of the preview and then do a color match using the color dropper.  To be able to pick the color from the preview screen, you have to save the screen grab as a jpeg and then open the jpeg file in Silhouette Studio. (Am I making any sense here?)

If you haven't already, open up your fill tool and click on the eye dropper.  Select the design piece you want to fill and then use the eye dropper to match the color or just pick whatever color you want from the color swatches shown.

Repeat for all of the pieces.

Once all of the pieces are filled in, you can start arranging them by simply selecting each piece and dragging it into position.  If something is 'behind' and you need it in front: select it > right click > bring to front.

Now after you have everything in the correct spot select it all and GROUP!!  (Select all pieces > Right Click > Group). Don't skip the grouping.

If you go to your cut style settings now you'll see every piece still has a cut line around it - as indicated by the bold red line.

This is NOT what we want for a print and cut.

We only want a cut line around the very outside of the design.  So instead of clicking 'Cut' you want to pick 'Cut Edge' (highlighted in blue).  And now you'll have something like this...

Yay!

We're almost ready to print and cut just like we normally would!  From here you know the drill...add your registration marks, resize your design if you need to and you're ready for printing!  If you're like "WHAT????? is she talking about...I'm a print and cut newbie?!" click here for my Print and Cut 101 tutorial to finish up.

And that's all there is to turning a Silhouette Studio cut file into a print and cut design.

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Thanks for coming to class today at Silhouette School.  If you like what you see, I'd love for you to pin it!