Creating Cutting Files from Your Favorite Stamps

by | Oct 6, 2008 | Stamps

Kelly D emailed me about tracing stamps so that you could cut out the shapes and then stamp right on the cutouts. She sells Close To My Heart stamps and wanted some tips. Fortunately, I’ve participated in a few CTMH hostess clubs and already had a number of their stamp sets. So, I pulled them out and selected one of my favorites: Flutter.

The nice thing about CTMH is that not only are they clear stamps, but they come with a backing sheet that has crisp black images which will scan into your computer beautifully. I removed the stamps and placed the backing sheet onto the scanner, picked a resolution of 300 and scanned it in black and white mode. The resulting image looked like this:


Next, in KNK Studio, I imported this scan and was careful to just left click once on the Sign Blank, rather than drag the cursor to the desired size. This will ensure the original sizes of the stamps are maintained. I then used the standard Accuscan method to auto-trace the image. I picked Logo-Long Lines and Curves as the default settings. After scanning and moving the vectorized image to the left of the original, the results were:

I then deleted the original, used Arrange>Break Path on the tracing, and began to delete the extra detail not needed. What I wanted were just the overall exterior details of these insects:

Then I selected my images and went to Transform>Outline. I used a thickness of 0.08, resulting in the blue outlines below. I kept the originals just in case I wanted to create a different thickness after test cutting the shapes.
Also, you’ll see the tiny little interiors on three of the insects. I kept them on the two larger insects but deleted them on the butterfly. Again, you just use Arrange>Break Path to separate the detail and then you can go in and delete those little paths.
The next step was to test cut the blue lines on white cardstock and I was really happy with the results. I placed the white cutouts on a black sheet so that I could clearly see them. Then, using clear acrylic blocks with these clear stamps, it’s actually very easy to see exactly where the stamped image will be placed so that centering isn’t a problem at all… even for someone who is stamp-challenged like myself. 😛


If any of you already own the CTMH Flutter stamp set, contact me at sandy@iloveknk.com and I will provide you the .knk file I created.