Rhinestone Design with Designer Silhouette Software

As I eluded to earlier, I whipped out a custom Rhinestone bag – – and it was easy to do!  Let me walk you through it…

With your regular Silhouette software, you can access lots of Rhinestone designs in the online store (all designs in the store are $1).  But the thing with Rhinestone designs is that you can’t resize them – they are pictures made out of specific-sized circles.  So if you resize them you mess up the circle size.  The Designer Edition Software allows you to make your own designs into rhinestone designs.  And remember, the Silhouette Studio Designer Edition software is on sale for half price (sale EXTENDED through FRIDAY), so it’s only $25.

 I can walk you through a brief how-to tutorial…

Start with your design – here I’m demonstrating with a simple circle.  Then click the rhinestone button (shown with the arrow) and it will pull up the whole rhinestone menu option thing on the left (shown with the wonky bracket)

If you’re using a design from a shape you found online, you might need to trace it first to get a cutting line.  If you drew your shape in the program, it’s already a cutting line (like above).  So you can decide how you want your rhinestones – here it’s clicked “edge” so they just go around the edge.  You can also fill them in a couple of different ways.  The other options you have are what size of rhinestones you want to use and spacing on them.  You can also “release them” so after it draws the edge you can remove a single one, etc.  And Single Click means you can click and add a single rhinestone where you’d like.  It’s very user-friendly.

For the Paparazzi rhinestone crown, when I traced it, it traced the outside and inside edge.  So I used the “fill” feature and filled in between the two traced lines.  I then released the path and took out a few that I thought were in a weird spot, and added a couple into spots that I thought were missing.  That was it!  Now my template was complete!

I’ve blogged before about how to use the rhinestone images, but basically it cuts a template.  You stick that template down onto a foam core board.  Then you can use it over and over again.  You just fill in the holes on your template with rhinestones – this is a little tedious:

Then you use the special rhinestone transfer tape (it holds up to heat) and put it on top of your design.  It’s sticky, so then you slowly peel it up and it holds all the rhinestones in place:

Once peeled off you have your design to put on whatever you want:

I put it on a canvas bag I had – then you iron it down.  I put a piece of cloth between the iron and the plastic.  Then heat it up – – you want the glue on the backs of the rhinestones to warm up and melt into your surface.  Then you can peel the transfer tape off:

I love that the template is reusable.  Now I can make a bunch of crowns and send them to people on my Paparazzi Team as incentives if I want and they can iron onto a shirt or bag or whatever.  Fun!!  I cut the letters shown out of black heat transfer vinyl.  Didn’t want to over-do the bling 🙂  I think I need to add “indepedent consultant” under the “paparazzi”, so it needs a little more tweaking.

Have you ever worked with DIY Rhinestones??