Terrijohnsoncreates.comUsing Designer Edition Plus

Cutting your Machine Embroidery designs in Designer Edition Plus is so easy & precise! You will never want to cut them in your hoop again!

Preparing Your Fabric: To get a clean, crisp cut on your Cameo, its important to stabilizer your fabric. Unlike cutting with a rotary cutter that rolls over your fabric, the Silhouette blade drags across the fabric. Without stabilization of some sort, it will drag and be ragged – if it cuts at all.

There are several options for Stabilizing

Sewable fabric interfacing, such as Heat n Bond lite, or the Silhouette brand - is a lightweight, fusible interfacing that is used to provide body & stability to fabrics that will be cut on the Silhouette Cameo, Curio, & Portrait Cutting machines. It’s appropriate for traditional quilt appliques, machine embroidery appliques & any fabric project that will be sewn through.

Heat n Bond - is a heavier fusible interfacing that gives the ability to cut intricate fabric designs & use them on any “no-sew” project – cards & scrapbooks, clothing, pillows, totes, banners & more!

Terial-Magic is a spray on, liquid stabilizer that was created to make fabric “fray-free” and more paper like. It completely washes out after use, returning the fabric to its original hand. So, it makes it perfect for quilts, where you don’t want any additional interfacing. Using it in addition to fusible interfacing gives you the cleanest, best cuts ever for Machine Embroidery Applique! No gumming your needle when stitching.

Cutting Your Applique Fabric with DE Plus

Open your embroidery designs in Silhouette Studio DE Plus. Most common formats will open in Studio. Open the “Love You Tons” by Sew Grammie, from your Student CD. I used the PES format 5x7 design.

You notice that the design is ungrouped – so there are two ways that you can go about isolating the tack down stitch to cut.

Method #1 –

You can drag away & delete the zig-zag applique stitches, along with the “embellishment” stitches – such as the toenails, eye & tail on this elephant design – leaving only the tack down stitch.

Now, it’s virtually impossible to see in the picture above, but there are 2 stitch lines – one is the placement and one is the tack down. They are identical - -so, you can use either one of them. Just be sure you aren’t cutting two sets of lines.

Method #2 – Cut by layer – With Cut by Layer, you don’t need to worry about the excess lines --

Open the Cut Style window and click on the Advanced Tab. Select Cut by Layer. For this method, you need to know which place in the color sequence your placement stitches are. For example, in the elephant design, the elephant placement is Color stop #1 and the heart is Color Stop #3.

You can determine this either from the color sequence chart that comes with many designs, or by opening your design in the embroidery software & checking the Color sequence there. From here, you can set the media type as Fabric, Send to Silhouette & cut!

If you want to increase the size a little to be sure that it can be caught in the tackdown, simply select the cut lines & offset by 1mm.

©Terri Johnson, All Rights Reserved. No portion of this may be reproduced or used to teach any classes. www.terrijohnsoncreates.com