Craft Edge

I bought the CD from La Pasche with all the Flippin' images on them. I imported one into my Cameo to print and cut and it had so many nodes, it turned out looking like it was torn. After spending three hours deleting nodes in the Cameo program, I figured there had to be an easier way to do this. I couldn't get the Simplify feature to get rid of many nodes. I imported the images into Inkscape, traced, broke apart, got rid of everything except the outline of the images.( I had to combine some lines to get a closed image.) Then saved the outlines in svg. I imported the Flippin image into my Cameo and did the trace and detach. Then imported my svg outline. Lined them up below the La Pasche image, did the print part, then moved the printed image aside so only the outline image was visible, clicked on the cut outline in Cameo and then cut the images out. So quick and easy and got a perfect cut. Hope this helps someone. I figured it would work with a lot of images that had tons of nodes in the print and cut feature with the Cameo.

My goodness...those turned out excellent!

I'm just curious....do you have SCAL3 also to work with the Cameo? It has the shadow feature that you could use with print and cut. Not sure what the software that comes with the Cameo has, so maybe that wasn't an option and maybe you didn't want a shadow.

I do have SCAL 3 for my Cameo. I wasn't trying to get a shadow. I made an actual SVG of the image outline to avoid having to spend hours deleting nodes in the Cameo program. Their Print and Cut feature is worth the price of the Cameo alone. Some print and cut images using the Cameo come out perfect without having to delete any nodes and some don't.

Thank you so much for this tip! I'm not that adventurous. I still tend to use the hinge method.

I love the Print and Cut with the Cameo!

I really am in love with that machine. I just wish I had time to play more.

I am SO trying to learn the Silhouette Studio (SS) software (It is free and anyone can download if you want to see what may come with the Cameo).

But I find that for me it just easier to design in inkscape and cut in SCAL, but only because I am too busy to learn SS. And there is an upgrade (the Designer version) that you can buy ($30-50) that will alllow you to open SVG files directly. I have not purchased that yet.

Buy the upgrade. It's worth it!

If you did all that, you might like using GIMP to trace the outlines. I use the magic wand selection tool to select the white background of images, then inverse the selection - which gets me the shape outlines I want. You can then save the selection paths as SVG. The magic wand tool has a lot of parameters you can set to get the selection just right.

In your steps below, I don't understand why you moved the images aside before cutting. You can set the lines to not cut.

- Jasen.

just a quick tip - sometimes when you get traced files ( even from the Silhouette shop) they have an amazing amount of nodes! If you use simplify then you can sometimes lose definition, select the outline you want to modify then go to Offset click on the offset option and put your value to 0 .. voilà new outline with very few nodes. delete the old outline and you're done! I bought a Hero Arts outline for an old stamp set and boy was it full of nodes so I tried this trick and it works just fine. Saves loads of time importing and exporting. I design cutting files and Offset has become a great ally!!
oops forgot to say that I'm talking about Silhouette Studio and this works with either version .

susibi wrote:just a quick tip - sometimes when you get traced files ( even from the Silhouette shop) they have an amazing amount of nodes! If you use simplify then you can sometimes lose definition, select the outline you want to modify then go to Offset click on the offset option and put your value to 0 .. voilà new outline with very few nodes. delete the old outline and you're done! I bought a Hero Arts outline for an old stamp set and boy was it full of nodes so I tried this trick and it works just fine. Saves loads of time importing and exporting. I design cutting files and Offset has become a great ally!!
oops forgot to say that I'm talking about Silhouette Studio and this works with either version .

Great idea! Thanks so much for posting this. I saved your post to my Silhouette Cameo folder so that I can use it in the future when I find too many nodes on a traced file.