Autumn Lights: How to dress up your tealights for Fall.

As much as I had fun reviewing the Silhouette Cameo, I really just wanted to play with it. Since Halloween I haven't had much of a chance to use it. Well, until today, when I finally had a break from chauffeuring my kids to their activities.

The Halloween decorations had come down but it is still Fall and I feel a need to make something Fall-ish. A look at the Lettering Delights site made me realize that I've never played with the Autumn Flourish SVG set before. What a pretty set! And it's perfect for the project I have in mind too.

One of the main differences between the free Silhouette Studio program and the $49++ Designer Edition upgrade is the latter's ability to import SVGs. I bought the upgrade several weeks ago and was pleased when File #1 from the Autumn Flourish SVGs opened nicely into the program.

I increased the height of the image to 5" and duplicated it 4 times. I also flipped two of them for a different look.

SVGs seem to import into the program without cut lines. I had to open the Cut Style Window and select "Cut" for the cut lines to show.

Once I see that the cut lines are there, I loaded the cardstock and mat into the Silhouette Cameo and sent the cut job to the machine.

Next, I had to make a blackout layer for each leaf. By welding two circles to the leaf, I separated the cutting path of the flourishes from it. 

By selecting Release Compound Path, the cutting paths of the flourishes are isolated from that of the leaf.

I am left with the blackout layer of the leaf after I had dragged the flourishes out and deleted them.

I duplicated the new blackout layer 4 times and cut out on vellum. By the way, since vellum is translucent, it really didn't matter if I flipped the image or not. If I wanted the image to face the other way, I could just flip the cutout instead.

Once I have all the cutouts, I attached each vellum piece to a leaf with glue dots.

 

Before attaching the leaves to the tealights, I wrapped a floral wire (from Michael's) around each tealight. 

I curled each leaf (without any special equipment, just do it by hand) and attached it onto the wire with a dab of hot glue.

The tealights look so pretty when the lights are on but they are stunning when the lights are off!

They look so perfect for around the house. Come to think of it, they are even perfect for the Thanksgiving table! Well, so far I've only made four. Guess I'd better go make a couple more.