CUPCAKE TOPPERS

This photo tutorial will help guide you when making these adorable little cupcake toppers.

I have made Minnie Mouse toppers, as I am doing a Minnie Mouse themed party. However the lovely thing about these toppers is that you can pretty much use any image or theme that you want. So whether its a number for the age of a person, a sentiment bubble or a cute character these topppers will be ideal for any occasion.

Whats needed:

Printer

Silhouette machine

Sheet of heavy weight paper or cardstock of your choice - in size of your choice

Cocktail sticks

Double sided sticky tape

How to create:
1. Firstly Open your silhouette studio programme and decide what size sheet of cardstock you will be filling and cutting, select this size from the menu. You now have a worksheet on screen that is the size you will be using.

I used an A4 sheet of 160g paper for these as you double them up so this seems to create a thick enough finished item.

2. Decide what image you want to use for your toppers and import/open this image onto your page. Re-size the image to the size you wish your topper to be. So if you want a 5cm tall topper, make sure your image is 5cm tall and so on. 

If this is a previously used image, make sure there are no cut lines set to cut for this image, if there is, be sure to select your item and select your 'no cut' option. (For more details on how to set/unset cut lines please see my other tutorials)

3. Open your 'Offset' menu and click on 'offset'. You will now see a border appear around your image that is the same distance all round your image. Use the 'offset distance' slider to get this border to be the distance you feel happy with away from your shape. This shouldn't be too far or too close, see the large image below for how far it looked when I had selected my offset distance.

4. When you are happy with your offset border,use ctrl A to select all (both the image and the border). Right click on the image and select duplicate and then right click on the duplicated image and select 'flip vertically'

5. Now you need to drag the flipped image and its border above your original image. Overlap the edges of the border, being careful not to go over the image itself with the border and making sure enough border is overlapping to create a good folding line (as this will be your final fold line). 

6. Once you have done this Ctrl A to select everything and then open your 'Allign' menu, click 'Allign center' and this will automatically line up your images so that they are perfectly situated above each other. Now deselect all and then re-select only the two border shapes. Open your 'Modify' menu and click Weld. Your two border shapes will have now become one large shape, creating one big outline around your two images and the crossed over lines between the bows will have now disappeared as the borders are not separate any more.

7. Now selected your border shape and in the line colour menu select a colour to replace the red border line, in this instance I've used a medium dark grey. This is so that when you print your final image out the border line will not be noticeable. Now open your cut style menu and you will notice there are no cut lines set to cut. With your border still selected, click the cut edge option. You should now see a red cut line appear on your border to indicate where your cuts will be made.

8.  Open the 'Registration mark settings' menu and tick the 'show reg marks' box. This will apply cross hatch lines around the top edge and bottom left corner of your page. This tells your silhouette machine where everything is situated and so where to cut. Ctrl A to select all and then position your whole image in the top left corner of your page. Being sure not to place the image over the crosshatch area, as anything in this area will not print or cut.

9. Open the 'replicate' menu. Click 'row of four' (or three dependant on the width of your paper and how many it will take to fill across the sheet) You may need to do this a couple f times or even just duplicate a single one to put at the end. Repeat this for columns until your page is filled, without touching any crosshatch areas. You could use the 'fill page' option however i found that this didn't fill the page effectively. In my case fill page created only 4 images, using columns and rows created nine.

10. Now you are ready to print. Click send to printer and print. You should now have a sheet that looks similar to this (I set the print options to photo as this gave a more even print that looked less pixelated - See my separate post showing the differences)

11. Mount your printed sheet onto your Silhouette cutting mat and load into your silhouette. Click 'send to silhouette' it will give you the option to print if you haven't or skip, skip as you have printed and it will then give you different options for registration detection. Choose to automatically detect registration marks. Your Silhouette will run the sheet through, but wont actually cut anything at this stage. Then follow the menu screens to set your paper type and blade depth etc, as you normally would and hit cut. Once your images are cut and carefully peeled off the mat, you should be left with something like this.

12. Turn your cut image over, apply a sticky strip to the back of your image

13. Peel off the sticky strip backing and apply a cocktail stick to the sticky area

14. Now carefully fold over the image so that all sides are even and that both sides are stuck onto the sticky strip. If the image you use is quite skinny, the sticky strip you use may not be wide enough to touch both sides of the image, in that case add a sticky strip to the back of both sides of the image (which is what i had to do with this one)

15. Your topper is now complete, pop it into the top of a nicely iced cupcake to match your themed party or even use sentiment bubbles to create your toppers and make thank you or well done or good luck cup cakes :)

Click here to download a printable PDF version of these instructions
Don't forget you can also click here to watch the Video Tutorial

If you have any questions on the above please feel free to contact me or leave a comment below and I will try to answer them as soon as possible.