Alcohol Ink on Laminating Pouches Cut with a Silhouette Cameo into Suncatchers

Last week I made some pumpkin suncatchers made out of laminating film. I had an sheet of orange leftover, so I decided to make a couple more colors and try cutting them with my Silhouette. I wasn't completely sure that it would work, but I saw a couple of successful posts from other bloggers about cutting out laminating film with the Silhouette, so I thought, hey, why not give it a shot.



I started by making a couple more colored sheets. I wanted to make one that was inspired by the color of fall leaves, so I got out all of my shades of green that weren't aqua or blueish and a couple shades of yellow and orange. I laid a laminating pouch out onto a craft mat and started dripping ink.


I filled my laminating film up with green and yellow ink and then filled in the last empty spots with some orange. I spread the ink around a bit with some canned air.


Next, I decided to make a sheet that was purple, black, and silver. I decided to try squishing the ink between the two sides of the pouch to get a base of color. I dripped 3 different shades of purple onto the film and then closed the pouch and smoothed the ink out a bit. It worked pretty well!


Then I added some black and silver and filled the rest in with purple until I was satisfied with the way it looked.


Sometimes, when you're crafting, things don't work out the way you expect. My husband is always telling me I need to include pictures of my screw ups so that people know what to avoid, etc.. So, I'm going to share a couple with you in today's post. I had my laminator warming up while I was inking, but I had flipped the pouches closed while I was working on each one (so I wouldn't get ink on my hands and I could move them around and stack them up, etc...). So, when I got to the laminator, the ink was still wet. These don't work when the ink is wet. The laminator mixes the ink and bubbles form where the plastic can't bond.


So, I flipped open my purple laminating pouch and returned to the ink to make a new green and yellow sheet.


Ah....that's better! Lesson learned. Make sure they are dry before running them through the machine.


Ok, well maybe not completely learned. I'm inpatient. The green and yellow one smooshed a bit, but it wasn't a failure.


The purple one turned out awesome!


The top part of the green and yellow one turned out perfectly, the bottom was a bit smooshed together.


Since I wasn't entirely sure the laminating film would cut on the Silhouette, I set up a sheet filled with jack-o-lanterns and leaves and decided to test it on my sort of successful green and yellow sheet. After reading a few blogs, I used the "sticker paper, clear" setting (blade depth 3, force/thickness 33, speed 4, double cut).


I stuck my laminating film to the mat and loaded it into the machine. Then I crossed my fingers and hoped it would work.


To my pleasant surprise, it cut perfectly!


Every jack-o-lantern and leaf cut crisply out of the film. I was really pleased.


I had a lovely stack of pumpkins and leaves. So, I thought I'd run my orange one through with the same design, but this time I added circles for hanging since they were a bit smaller than expected (I'm terrible at visualizing size from the screen) and I wasn't sure if my regular hole punch would work.


So, I stuck my leftover orange sheet to the mat and loaded it in the machine and set it to cut with the same settings.


Unfortunately, my broken in mat (as in it's been used with paper projects) was not quite sticky enough for the rigid transparency film. One of the pumpkins pulled off the mat while it was cutting and got stuck under one of the bars that the cutter slides around on, and the whole design got out of alignment.


In the end, I had 3 pumpkins and 1 leaf that didn't get messed up.


I was still optimistic that I could successfully cut my purple sheet. For these colors, I selected a group of ghosts. I opened up the flap on the Silhouette and babysat it as it cut so that I could catch it if anything started peeling up, but it cut perfectly.


So even with the snafus, I ended up with some really cute suncatchers.


I also successfully cut laminating film with the Silhouette which opens the door for other fun projects.


The ghosts are so lovely and colorful!


As an odd added bonus, the neatly cut sheets could potentially be used for stencils. Really pretty stencils, too.

 

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