Silhouette {Tutorial} - Print & Cut

The Silhouette can do many amazingly awesome things, the problem is you have to know how to use the software to get it to do all those amazingly awesome things. I will try to bring you some Silhouette Tutorials as questions come my way.
Today's tutorial is how to effectively use the Print & Cut feature on your machine to "punch" out party circles/logos/tags in many different shapes without needing any physical punches! I am going to use my Spring party tags from my latest Crafty Ladies Night Out post. However after going through the steps to make the tutorial I realized it would be easier if I resized my dimensions to make it easier for you. So you can now download those newly resized pages here and here. However my screen shots will have the original files.

***warning - the following tutorial is rather wordy - my apologizes in advanced***
{if you want to see more details in the photos just click on them to get a full screen view}

Open a new Silhouette Studio page and turn on your registration marks

  Import the downloaded file into your Library

Go to your image library and double click on the file you just imported. If you can not find it make sure you are looking in the folder that is called "Show All Designs" it should be in there. When you open the image it will be much larger than your page, just resize it until the graphics fit in the red box (which is the constraints on the cutting area).

It should look like this

 Using the circle drawing button on the left hand side of the screen, make a circle that is the size you wan your "punch" to be and center it around the tag (Silhouette studios gives you great guides that show you the height and width of your drawing so you know it's an exact circle). 

a closer look - then copy and paste that circle as many times as punches you need. You will have to manually center the circles on top of each graphic.

But you don't just have to use circles. Here I took a scalloped circle shape I had and resized it to fit my graphic and then copied and pasted it 2 more times.

And then I did the same with a scalloped square

And a fun bracket shape, too!

(this completes our screen shot portion of the tutorial)

Now you are ready to print and cut the page. Here is where the tricky wordy part starts. First you want to go to Object>Cut Line Settings and make sure that the large imported file is not set to cut because it will try to cut all the way around the border of that file you imported (just select that line/large box that is going all the way around the page and then click "no cut"). Then, for some reason Silhouette will not print the registration marks correctly if you have an image on top of them (even though you can clearly see those registration marks in full in the photo above, the white portion of my image is sitting on top of them and they wouldn't print out for me). So if at all possible make your image smaller than those marks, however that's not always possible so here is the trick I use. With the registration marks on, move the image (not your cut out punch shapes) off the page, print the page (which will just print the 3 registration marks and nothing else), then move your image back into place (make sure your punches are still centered), turn off the registration marks and print your page again. Now, turn those registration marks back on so that the software will take you through the correct prompts to detect those registration marks.  Now we are ready to cut. Select your paper type and make sure you have the right cap on your blade and press "send to Silhouette". It will ask you if you want to print or skip printing, since we already printed it being all sneaky and stuff, skip the printing. Then it will ask you if you want to detect registration marks, and the answer is Yes! This is how the machine knows exactly where to cut your shapes in relationship to your printed page. Once the marks have been detected you just tell it to go ahead and cut and that's it!! Now it may take a couple of times of trial and error to get it all down but of course practice makes perfect! Here is what mine looked like

I hope that this make some sense. It is way easier to do than to explain, so if there are any parts that don't make sense please leave a comment and I will email you back! Or leave me a posting on my Facebook page and I will get back to you there! Happy Crafting!