graphtec – Coastal Business Current

Creating Rhinestone Templates in Silhouette Studio

It is February and Valentine’s theme is all around us. With that in mind, we are bringing you detailed instructions on customizing and creating your own rhinestone template designs that you can fall in love with! All you need is the Cameo, Silhouette Studio Designer edition, Sticky Flock, and of course – rhinestones!

To install the Designer edition- open the Silhouette Studio® software program, go to the “Help” menu, select” Upgrade Silhouette Studio”, enter the following: Designer Edition license key, Silhouette account email address, Silhouette account password. Click on the “Submit” button. The license key will then be applied and the software will be upgraded immediately. If you need to locate this number, you may find it by signing into your account either in the Silhouette Design Store in the software, or by signing into your account through the website. Once logged in, you may go to the My Account page. Your license key code will be listed under Silhouette Studio Keys. In the Silhouette Design Store, the number is listed at the bottom of the main account page. The Silhouette Studio Designer Edition code can only be applied twice.

You can create designs in Silhouette Studio’s Designer Edition by converting simple images to rhinestones, by point and click or completely freehand drawing. In our example, we have combined all three options.

Open your image by going to File, then Open:

screen1 — A simple silhouette or an outline is easy and more flexible to work with for rhinestones.

In the page settings window, adjust the size of your rhinestone template material (StickyFlock). We are not using a cutting mat for our example so our setting is “none”, however if using a cutting mat, select the cutting mat size from the drop down menu. It is important to do these steps in order to size and place your design correctly based on the cutting area you are dealing with. page settings If you are working with JPG, BMP, PNG or another type of raster file, you will have to trace the image to create a vector version of it. Refrain from scaling up the image for now. NOTE: Raster graphics can typically be scaled down with no loss of quality, but enlarging a raster image causes it to look blocky and “pixelated.” Because vector-based images are not made up of a specific number of dots like rasters are, they can be scaled to a larger size and not lose any image quality. Raster files: BMP, .TIF, .GIF, .JPG Vector files: .AI, .EPS, .SVG, .DRW

If you don’t know how to trace an image, please visit our Print and Cut tutorial and see steps 2 to 12 for detailed instructions. http://blog.coastalbusiness.com/print-and-cut-tutorial/

For our example, we traced around the wine glass silhouette, unchecked both High Pass and Low pass filter and selected Trace Outer Edge since we don’t have any details. Your object should be completely yellow to tell the program what it is tracing around. traced glass Before selecting Trace Outer Edge- object is all yellow

beforetrace — After selecting Trace Outer Edge- there is now a red outline around the object. We moved the image slightly to the right to see if we are satisfied with the result. The black silhouette layer is the raster image and the red outline layer is the vector image. 4. You can go ahead and delete your raster image as you don’t need it anymore. What you should be left with is just your traced outline (vector). With the image selected, you can comfortably size your vector image bigger or smaller by dragging one of the four corners in or out.

rhinestone window — Once you have the size you want, click on the “Rhinestone Window” button.

With the image selected, click on one of the options on the right under Rhinestone effect. The four options are None, Edge, Linear Line and Radial Fill. The Edge option lines your design edge with rhinestones, while the Linear and Radial Fill fill the design with various patterns. Play around and see which one produces your most desired effect. Then under Rhinestone size, select the size of rhinestone you would like. Smaller sizes result in more detail. rhinestone fill For our design, we selected radial fill and 10 ss.

Selected area for deletion by clicking and dragging — At this point, we are ready to customize our design. The first step in our design is to remove half of the rhinestones in the glass so it looks like there is liquid about halfway up. Also there are some details at the bottom of the glass that we want to remove as well. To do that, have your image selected and on the right within your settings, scroll all the way down and click on Release Rhinestones. Now you have each individual rhinestone separated from the others. By clicking on one, you can move it or delete it and by clicking in an empty area and dragging, you can select multiple rhinestones.

before rhinestone — Before (click and delete)

single click — After removing the desired areas, you can then place rhinestones by hand using either the Single Click or Freehand option on the right.

detail1 — We created the heart on top of the wine glass by drawing it in that position using the Freehand option and selecting the 6ss size rhinestones. After what roughly looked like a heart, we selected all newly created areas, clicked on Release Rhinestones and moved around the rhinestones to shape them into a perfect heart. If there are gaps, you can add a single rhinestone at a time by selecting Single Click.

detail 2 — If you have overlapping sections, you will have to delete extra rhinestones by individually selecting them. You may have to move a few or add an extra one here and there to make the design more complete. 10. Once you have your design finalized, you have the option to leave it as is or group all the rhinestones back together to have one cohesive piece that you can move. Click and drag around all elements, then right click and choose “Group.”

DO NOT resize your design once it has been converted to rhinestones. The rhinestone size has been set and drawn exactly as is, so if you resize and run it through the cutter, the holes will not match the rhinestones.

rhinestone count — You can find out how many rhinestones your design requires once finished. In the Rhinestones settings page, all the way at the bottom there is Totals (all shapes) section. That shows the total number used from each size.

Mix and Match Idea!

vinyl mix — You can mix in rhinestones with a vinyl cut design. Just use the Single Click option to add exact size rhinestones to any design. The cutter will cut them out and once you press your vinyl on your material, you can then place your rhinestones in the sized holes within the design and press again.

2013 – What’s New and Exciting at Coastal?

The post 2013 – What’s New and Exciting at Coastal? appeared first on Blogging with Coastal – Transfer Paper, Sublimation, Heat Press, Vinyl and More!.

With the first month of the year a little over halfway done, we all hopefully have a pretty good idea of our “plan” for 2013 and are starting to implement those thing to make our year successful. That is no different at Coastal. We have spent time budgeting, planning and just making sure we know where we are going. Pretty exciting times for sure.

I want to share a few of the things we are doing at Coastal that I am very excited about for 2013. I’d love to hear the new things you are excited about in your business in the comments section.

1) One of the first real new products of the year for us, is the new Graphtec CE6000 series of cutters. I have seen this machine in action and while it still brings you the same great product you expect out of a Graphtec machine. It also has a cool new look and some great new features, including what James from Graphtec called an “Easy” button. On top of the new hardware, Graphtec is releasing new software called Graphtec Studio that comes with the machines. It is easy to use and has a wonderful new look. This software will also be available for download sometime soon for those of you with the CE5000 series machines.

2) Some of you may or may not know, but at Coastal we have been involved with wide format professional solutions for about 4 years now. We have helped many companies achieve a very professional level of production with items like Mutoh printers and AIT large format heat presses and much more. We also have a line of wide format sublimation inks, a nice offering of solvent printable media, solvent inks and more. Again, as I said, only some of you have probably heard about that as it seems to be a pretty well-kept secret. In 2013 we have vowed to make that less of a secret and have already changed the name of the division to our “Professional Solutions” division. Rich Foltz is heading up this division and has been involved from the start. Rich has many years of experience in the industry and is an expert in sublimation and digital decoration. Our plans this year are to revamp our Professional Solution portion of the website to make it easier to use and understand, bring you more training videos and webinars on wide format production and to get on the road and show off our stuff. Rich and I will be in Orlando at the end of February at the Graphics of the America’s show bringing you great solutions for high volume production. The best part is these solutions are much more affordable than you might think. Ask us how we can help.

3) We have been testing several new 3D heat press machines over the last 6 months. We are excited about the possibilities here and plan to have a full line of products that work with these cool new units. These machines will allow you to press things like plates, crystal, phone cases without metal and many other cool things. We actually have the smaller “Briefcase” model online now with more to come. Keep an eye on our site for these as they should hit our warehouse soon.

4) We have planned out our 2013 trade show schedule and have already hit the road for our first event, the ISS Long Beach Trade Show. This year we have committed to a few more shows, and have downsized the booth a little to do so. This will give us a better opportunity to meet more people and have better intimate conversations with our friends (customers) throughout the country. This will be my 13^th year of traveling to these shows, and I’m still very excited to see everyone. I also expect this year to bring new innovations as we seem to be climbing out of the economic hole. This will help manufacturers loosen their wallets a bit and start developing again. Will the ink manufacturers finally start developing again, and how about the heat press equipment guys? I’m looking forward to checking it all out and showing off what we can offer. If you are at a show please make sure you come by and say hello. I want to meet you!

Coastal is committed to our customers and to helping them succeed. Our company motto and the philosophy we live by is “To the extent we serve…We succeed”. That motto drives our business and therefore many of these exciting new things are driven by you. Please make sure you let us know how we can help you. Check out our hot products for 2013 and let us know how we can help your business.

On my own personal side, I’m pretty excited to be starting a podcast with a really good friend of mine, Terry Combs. Planning is still in the works so our schedule is not set yet, but we will most likely be getting together on the podcast twice a month to talk all kinds of topics related to personalization (and probably others that are not). We are open for ideas and will talk about subjects you guys want us to talk about. Things like marketing, decorating techniques, pricing, where to find customers and most likely beer, chicken wings, college basketball and other fun topics. We might have a special guest every now and again and will probably open up the lines to callers. There will be an online chat available and some other fun stuff. It will be called “2 Regular Guys Radio Podcast”. We are set up on Twitter, so let’s start interacting there – www.twitter.com/2RGsPodcast and let us know what you want us to talk about.

The post 2013 – What’s New and Exciting at Coastal? appeared first on Blogging with Coastal – Transfer Paper, Sublimation, Heat Press, Vinyl and More!.

EasyWeed is Easily the Easiest!

We used EasyWeed Stretch on these boxing shorts to create a durable and stretchy design!

Of all my favorite ways to make cool t-shirts here working at Coastal Business, I am especially partial to vinyl transfers. They’re light in hand, with great durability, and come in a wide variety of colors, textures, and even special effects to really make a t-shirt design POP at a customer. And when your mind is on your design, it’s nice to have a product like EasyWeed to take the additional guesswork out of creating your garment.

EasyWeed, the family of heat transfer vinyl by Siser, is a popular choice for apparel decorators. It’s simple to cut and apply, works well on a wide variety of fabric types, and appeals to customers due to its soft, thin properties. It’s also been around for quite awhile, so the company has earned a pretty good reputation in the industry for making a consistently performing product. Continue reading “EasyWeed is Easily the Easiest!”