How to Make Silhouette Rhinestone Sprays (Cut on Vinyl, HTV, & Stencils, too!)

Today I'm answering a reader question on the blog.  The reader asked how to create a rhinestone spray design in Silhouette Studio. It's actually something I've contemplated myself, but it wasn't until this reader inquired that I really felt the challenge to sit down and figure it out. OOHHMMMGGGG you guys - this is so stinking easy - and fast. She literally emailed me back, "How did you do that so fast?"

Well, my friends it's far easier than it looks - if you have Designer Edition. As we've discussed here in the past, you need Silhouette Studio Designer Edition to make custom rhinestone templates and that's what is needed for this tutorial.  But the best news is just because you're using the rhinestone tool, doesn't mean you have to use rhinestones when you cut...as you can see, I cut my spray design on HTV!
So if you have DE go ahead and open up Silhouette Studio. If you don't, stop stalling and go get yourself DE or higher - you won't regret it.

With Silhouette Studio open, open up a design. Use a basic shape like a heart or a shamrock. You don't want anything with too much detail or the rhinestone spray design will get muddled. Less is more here.

Select the design and then click the rhinestone tool from the right sidebar.

Under Rhinestone Effect pick the 'Edge' option.  This turns the line into a bunch of rhinestone circles.

Select 6ss from the rhinestone size area.

If the rhinestones aren't in a nice neat line, enlarge the design just enough so that you get a nice evenly spaced line of rhinestones.  You want to size the design now figuring you'll add about three inches to the design's height and width with the spray.  If you wait to resize until after you've added the rhinestone spray the design will get distorted and the dots will either be overlapping or too far apart.

I also like to fill in the circles with color. This really helps to 'see' the finished design easier. Use the fill tool and change the line color to transparent.  

With the rhinestone shape selected still, open the Offset panel from the right sidebar.  Click "Offset".

Set the offset to a distance where the two rows of rhinestones are not touching, but are still pretty close together.

Now you can keep the second row of rhinestones at 6ss or you can bump it up to 10ss. I like to keep the two inside rows about the same size and distance between rhinestones.

Repeat the offset process again (you can choose to make the offset distance the same or more it's totally up to you).  At this point I like to change the rhinestone size to 10ss AND I like to space them out a little bit more to start getting the spray effect.

Continue to repeat, always offsetting the outermost layer:

• 4th row:  16ss rhinestones, more space between them
• 5th row : 20ss rhinestones, more space between them
• 6th row: 20ss rhinestones, so much space between them there's only about 6 or 8 rhinestones in the entire offset row

Once you get the spray going you can click on the 'freehand rhinestone' tool and add a few extras here and there to extend the spray. Or click "release rhinestones' to delete or manually move individual stones.

When you are finished adding layers to the spray, group it all together.

I quickly made three and here's how they turned out.

Now you can cut this on rhinestone template material and fill it with rhinestones.  Or not!

This girl doesn't have too much patience for rhinestones these days, which is why I took the easy way out...and cut on HTV.  Holographic HTV, glitter HTV, regular vinyl or freezer paper to make a stencil for fabric paint are all great alternatives as well depending on what you want to do with your spray design.

If you do cut on vinyl, HTV or stencil material just be careful weeding so that you don't lose any of  the dots.

And here's my HTV shamrock tea towel...made from this canvas painters drop cloth and a rhinestone spray design.  Go figure...nothing's what it seems :)

 Here's a closer look...

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