Trick to Creating Custom Shaped Weeding Boxes to Limit Waste (Silhouette Studio Tutorial)

If you're into not wasting vinyl, but want to make weeding as easy as possible, then you need to know about weeding boxes. They're an alternative to weeding lines that work well when you have either very small designs or design with very small areas that would be difficult to weed if they were spliced up by weeding lines.

Usually you'd create a weeding box by drawing a box around your design, then you can weeding it away for easy weeding. But if you have an odd-shaped design, adding a traditional square or rectangle weeding box around it can be a huge waste of vinyl or htv.

Today I'm going to share you an alternative that will allow you to create a weeding box, but with limited waste.

A few weeks ago I cut this large HTV design.  The design is in the shape of a V but the v is made up of very small words.  Many of those words contain letters that have counters - those are the inner parts of letters such as e, b, d, a...

If I added weeding lines those already tiny pieces would be made even small by a splice as you can see here...

If I added a weeding box, I'd waste a ton of vinyl....

...and so I decided I needed a custom size weeding box that would avoid both.

Guess what...I figured out that if you put a large offset around your design it acts as a weeding box that just so happens to border around the design. Problem solved...

In this case I used an offset of .325, but the offset distance will vary for every project.

Here's how it weeded...

And while I'm left with a few odd-shaped scraps, they're large enough that I can actually still use them for another project and I'm not faced with throwing out perfectly good htv. Win-win-win. 

Want to know what I did with this oddly shaped HTV cut? Here's the answer! Details on how I turned the text into the shape of the letter here!

Note: This post may contain affiliate links. By clicking on them and purchasing products through my links, I receive a small commission. That's what helps fund Silhouette School so I can keep buying new Silhouette-related products to show you how to get the most out of your machine!

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

Get Silhouette School lessons delivered to your email inbox! Select Once Daily or Weekly.

Subscribe Here!