Cutting Planner Sheets with a Silhouette

Are you considering jumping on the planner train? It’s being talked about everywhere! Since I’m a digi girl and keep my schedule, tasks, lists, design ideas, etc. on my believed i-devices, I’m still on the fence … although I did buy an Avery mini-binder to play with … so I’ll see where that takes me.

Many designers are providing pre-formatted planner inserts and embellishment and sticker sheets meant to be printed and cut out. The planning sheets and pages of square/rectangular elements are easy enough to cut with a paper trimmer or scissors, but some of the embellishment/sticker sheets can be a bit trickier. As I was pondering this issue, I remembered I had a Silhouette Portrait machine sitting a drawer gathering a dust bunny family. I bought it (gently used) from a friend because I just HAD to make my own stencils for my mixed media work. Silly Vicki. One of these day’s I’ll figure that out! However, it turned out to be quiet easy to use the Silhouette to cut out the embellishment/sticker sheets. Last year I recorded a short (about 12 minute) video to show you how easy it is.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• I use the Designer Edition of the Silhouette software, but the same steps work in the regular edition.
• I used a PNG sheet of stickers (which is when the background is transparent). You can also use a JPG sheet, however you’ll need to significantly scale down the size of the file when you’ve brought it into the Silhouette software. I was not able bring in a PDF file into the Silhouette software however, I opened the PDF in both Photoshop CC (and also in Photoshop Elements 13) and saved the file from there as a JPG
• I printed onto Presentation paper, but if I had thought about it first, I would have printed onto sticker paper instead. You don’t need expensive sticker paper for this – I use Avery full sheet “mailing labels” I get from Amazon. Works just fine!

Remember, you can make cuttable sheets from any kit in your stash and the designers at Oscraps – we have an entire section of our shop dedicate to planner products!