Inkscape - Create One Piece Stencils

hello fellow crafters I am back today to show you how you can use Inkscape to make a reusable one-piece special a lot of times when you make a stencil and you've got words you have a little inside pieces of some of your letters think for example like a lowercase or capital B you know has a little inside pieces a lot of times you lose those and and you're not quite sure you know how to get them put back in there you know just right and you know maybe all of their different pieces don't look exactly the same because you know you didn't place that piece exactly where it went each time so I'm going to show you how you can quickly and easily make any font that you want into a reusable stencil so I'm an Inkscape here and I'm going to come over here and go left on my screen and I'm gonna go ahead and add some text and since I'm showing you how to do this with any font I'm gonna pick one of my favorites which is this one right here and I'm just going to use my last name so here is my text and first thing I need to do is go ahead and convert it to a path so I showed you before you can either come up here and do object to path or you can use your keyboard shortcut which is what I do which is ctrl shift C then I ungroup it all which is ctrl shift G or over here the ungrouping is this little circle with a rectangle or a P under object there's your ungroup with that same symbol I mean I like the keyboard it makes things faster for me so shift ctrl G at this point if you want to rearrange anything you know you can but I usually just leave it where it's at and then I'm Union it or weld it all together which is past Union or I use my keyboard I hit ctrl and then the plus button another plus button so now I have a single path you can see here that I can go ahead and make into a stencil so to make a stencil I'm going to add a rectangle and you can see it's white you can change the color of it by picking a color along the bottom the color really doesn't matter just needs to be different from your other color so you can see the difference and I'm going to move that to the back you can either do object lower to bottom or you can hit the end button on your keyboard like that and then I'm going to position it where I wanted one thing I recommend is if you know that you're putting this on something that's you know 8 by 10 inches well go ahead and make this rectangle 8 by 10 inches so I'm going to unlock this and I'm going to make the width 8 or actually in this case ten and the height 8 and I don't lock that back up and then I can take my text here what I'm going to be painting or you know whatever it is that you're going to be doing with it to make the stencil and then I'm going to make that as Vegas you know I can or however much of that space I want to make and then if I want it centered I just select both of them and then you can go to I keep it over here that pinned over on the side my align and distribute you can get to it by clicking on object align and distribute and it will pop it up for you and I Center it vertically and horizontally so now I've got it in the center so then whenever I go to actually use my stencil I just line up the edges of my stencil with the edges of what I'm putting it on and then I know that my text is centered where it's supposed to be all right so the next thing to do is to go ahead and what we might say slice my words out of the stencil so I'm going to select both and I use the control and the minus button or is up here path and then difference so you see it's control and a minus button and so now I have the hole in my stencil and a lot of times you stop here and then you go but then you have you'll notice like this piece of a piece of the ELLs the E and then even like these pieces in here that will will not be attached to the main part of the stencil so this is where I grab my little rectangle tool and I'm just going to come in and I'm just going to add little pieces right here so you can see and I'm going to change that color so you can see it good let's go with blue so I added one there I'm going to add one here and sorry have one here and if you want them to all be the same size you could just draw one and you could duplicate it this is the duplication key over here on the right I use the control D or you can come up here the object maybe not object edit and duplicate so I'm going to duplicate this one and then you can put it right here and then I'm going to make another one from that one and make another one from that one make another one let's see put it right here put one right here and then right there so that should make all of these inside pieces attached to the outermost piece so now what I do is I take those rectangles and I Union them together with the background piece so I selected them I'm selecting the background and again I'm using my shortcut ctrl + + and then it welds it or unions it all together so now this little what would have been an island is connected to the outside piece by the little bridge that I put in there so I will no longer have an island now it's attached so the inside piece will not separate from the main piece of the stencil and then once I'm done you know I put this on my wood or on my shirt whatever I'm putting it on and I paint it when I remove the stencil then I just have to go in and hand fill in those little spots you know to connect where where the where those gaps are but when I look at this it looks like this one here I don't quite like how it cut it so I can hit undo and I'm just gonna adjust this one a little bit mm okay I'm gonna put it over here like that just cuz I didn't like where it was and then again I can you need it together again and that's it now I'm done so then you just save this as your SVG so I would call this our stencil and you can do it as an escape SVG or a plain SVG the only differences Inkscape SVG keeps some you know metadata that a plane SVG doesn't but both will upload into Cricut design space so you just save it and then you're ready to upload it and cut it out so I hope that you found this tutorial helpful for how you can keep all of your pieces as one single piece or as a stencil that maybe you want to reuse or even if you don't want to reuse it you just don't want those pieces you know flapping around everywhere whenever you go to to make your stencil and you're going to cut it out of vinyl you know it still works just remember after you've painted your stencil in and you pull the stencil off then go ahead and fill those gaps you know by hand so that way your design is complete so if you found this tutorial helpful I'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you have any comments or suggestions or anything feel free to leave them in the comment section thanks guys happy crafting

Channel: jenEcustoms Tutorials

Views: 6,173

Keywords: Inkscape, Cricut, Stencil, Gap, Attach, Letters, Font, Reusable, Island, Bridge

Id: JDcV72VMQ08

Length: 9min 24sec (564 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2018