Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Magnet Paper, Who Knew?

If you're like me (and just about every other girl, and frankly, guy that I know) then you are a fan of Disney's movie Tangled.  Almost every time I whip out a frying pan I think "Frying pans, who knew?"  So when I wanted to finally try out Silhouette's Printable Magnet paper, I thought, "why not?" and made a few Tangled magnets for my nieces to play with.  To be honest, what I really wanted to make was a new magnet for our dishwasher, so as to replace what we were (shamefully) currently using:


Ahem.  Yeah, embarrassing.  But I digress.  There was sadly a lack of many options for already created images in the Silhouette online store or just on the web, for that matter, so I made my own.  Rather than waste the rest of this lovely sheet of magnet paper, I came up with some other things I might want to make with it.  Enter-- college sports' team mascot and the Tangled characters.  

What a great way to use excess paper, or to use this paper in general!  Make your own fun magnets of your favorite team to give out at a "game-day" party or of your student's school to show support, create some with your business logo and contact info, make your own magnet of places that you've visited to get one looking just the way you want, "paper" dolls and clothes, or just make some of your favorite characters for the kids to play with on their magnet board.  Capturing images from online and then making them something you can cut on your silhouette is actually pretty easy using the trace and detach feature in the trace window in your Silhouette Studio.  After selecting your area to be traced uncheck the "High Pass Filter" and then play around with your threshold to get it so it has the image covered where you don't want it to cut.  For these images, I set my threshold at about 98% each time because I didn't want any of the inside portions cut.  Check out the following Tutorial on how to do this in more detail.  Note:  I didn't follow all that the author of this tutorial suggests doing, but the video was still helpful in getting showing me the basics of how to get it to cut my image.  

Once I had detached my image, I cut and pasted it onto a new page just so I didn't have to deal with all the white space stuff left behind.  Then I went to the "cut" window, and clicked "cut edge."  The great thing about looking at your design with the cut window open, is that it shows you exactly where your cuts are going to go.  Be sure that you look over your design to make sure nothing is being cut that you don't want to.  This is how you make your own print and cut designs.  I didn't want anything inside my dishwasher magnet to be cut out beyond the main outer edge, so I just selected each of the inside images and changed them to "No Cut".  


Be sure that you have your registration marks showing,  and that you check what part of your images are going to be cut.  Select "No Cut" for any image you dont' want cut.
 After that, I sent my page to the printer and set it to "photo paper" so that my printer would compensate for the slightly glossy feel of the printable side of the magnet paper.  Because I had everything just fine and dandy and within the lines of my registration marks, the Silhouette cut the paper PERFECTLY and out came some fun new magnets.  My niece will love these.





Magnet paper....who knew?

2 comments:

  1. I would totally enjoy making my own team! Who isn't a Disney fan here, anyway? Though it's hard to choose only one among all astonishingly good shows, I might go with Family Guy. XD It's canny that you used magnet sheets for this craft, by the way. Adhesives usually make projects a little messy. :] -->Jake

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  2. @Jake: Disney is great, right? And actually, there was no adhesive for these magnets as I used the printable magnet sheets--so it printed the images right onto the magnet sheet and then the silhouette cut it! Thus, no mess. :) A fun use for these sheets. Thanks for your comment!

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