Saturday, April 6, 2013

Silhouette Cameo Stencil Fail

After very many failed attempts, I have nearly come to the conclusion my new Silhouette Cameo will etch mylar, but not cut it.

Today, I first tried feeding in the mylar by itself and the machine actually did a pretty nice job cutting it. But it became clear pretty quickly why you need a backing material on the plastic: The cut pieces started to separate and stick out and the mylar would not have fed properly when it was rolling back and forth cutting the design, so I stopped the project in the middle. Here is that attempt.
So, I gave the cutting mat another try. After a couple failed tries, Jeff suggested I try cutting a small design (Duh!) so I created a small stencil design from our dining room curtain project. (And I'll say it again, the software is great!)
I tried cutting this out eight times, each time adjusting the blade depth, material thickness and other settings. Luckily, I did minimize the loss of mylar by moving the image around on the sheet, using different corners for each attempt.
These numbers refer to the blade depth, not the attempt number
Design etched onto the mylar
I'm pretty sure this is 7mil mylar, which I purchased from StencilEase last year.

Amy Miller, who published Stenciling the Arts & Crafts Home, recommends stencils be cut from 5 to 7mil mylar, so I will probably try and locate some thinner plastic. I found a blog post from one woman who successfully cut plastic purchased from JoAnn's, so I will probably go and pick up some of those sheets and see if they'll work.

I did receive the vinyl I ordered, but the stuff is crap; it is tissue thin and only good for one use. And it's expensive—$15 for a 3-foot by 9-inch piece. That's not at all what I'm interested in using. I'll save the stuff for sometime when I don't care about it being destroyed after one use.

No comments:

Post a Comment