Door Hanger For Authors To Gift

Welcome to another edition of Makers Make. This door hanger is a lovely gift to give your readers or design one for your craft. The possibilities are endless.

So, let's begin.

I'm using the 2 Door Hangers design #42414 by Alaa'k from the Silhouette store. Notice this comes with a pocket, which I thought was a great way to add a business card to the back. This design comes with a scalloped pocket and a crenelated edge, along with a rectangle that serves as a notecard. Very cute.

However, I chose to cut off (slice) along that dotted line (which would be a perforation line, and make mine simple. (And I added my info to the back via a stamp which I'll show you how to make in an upcoming Makers Make!)

I ungrouped all parts of the two designs, deleted the other design and placed this on my matt.

As I'm an author I chose a variety of designs that I could use for my reader base, but you can use whatever is applicable to your niche. 


Since I cut off the pocket, I needed to add a line so that the design was complete and cut. Then I grouped it to the main image. I also changed the size as the original seemed very long. I kept the width because it worked well with the images I used. 

Now for the creative part. I found these images in the Silhouette  Design Store: 

• Tropical Flowers #296632 by Sweet Elsie. 
• The book, The Magic of Reading #94027 by Sophie Gallo 
• My Weekend Is All Booked #271234 by Sophie Gallo. 

I used the pattern "Checkmate". Also remember, if you own a digital paper, you can drag and drop it into "patterns" in your library!!

I MERGED the flower into my design, removed it from its trace and duplicated it. Then flipped the duplicated flower horizontally and had to rotate it to match the way I wanted it to.

Then I moved the right flower on top of the left, grouped and sized it appropriately for my design concept. Then to make it easier (not a necessary step, but it helped tremendously) I traced and detached the flowers to have a smaller square. 

I MERGED My Weekend Is All Booked design, then ungrouped and selected all of the book as I didn't want that particular book. Then deleted those parts.  

I picked a color from the flower and filled My Weekend Is All Booked.  

Then MERGED in The Magic of Reading. Sized it, ungrouped it,  colored it, picking colors from the flowers with the color dropper made the bookmark on the book (in orange) bigger, moved all its parts into place, then regrouped.  

(Hint, if you use the layers panel and create the layers as you go, it's easier to do this, and I'll show you a layers tutorial later, but right now, scan YouTube for them, or check out Silhouette School blog or Silhouette 101. In this case, I moved the text out of the way, grouped the book and moved the text back into place.)

I made a rectangle at the bottom and filled with a pattern, I used Checkmate, but hard as I looked I couldn't find it in the current pattern selection in the Silhouette store.

So I used a striped pattern that is available in a number of colors in the store. I added the flower and haven't centered anything yet. 

So now I've selected the door hanger, the graphic and used the TRANSFORM PANEL (my favorite panel of all) and centered the graphics. An OOPS, I realized somehow I made the left words green. Easy fix, just used the dropper on them again. 

Final Touch, adding a gradient fill to the background.  Make sure all your elements are forward or on top of the hanger itself. Click the hanger, fill with gradient and ROTATE to 90 degrees or it will be a sideways gradient. 

Then be sure to add your registration marks from the set-up page and while there, add this tip from Melissa Viscount at Silhouette U,

"Turn on the PRINT BLEED in your set-up page. You won't see the bleed, but it does print."  Thanks, Melissa.

Then make sure your door hangers are within the red Print and Cut lines.  Notice my setting in the red box above. This gives you the maximum space on the card stock. 

Now it's time to cut. On the send panel make sure nothing is selected but the edge. CUT EDGE. If there are any red lines on your artwork, and generally on a composite like this, everything you've added has a red line, you have to Click to select each lined section on the design and then click NO CUT in the panel. 

Remember to set your material. I use heavy card stock so generally pick Textured card stock, and I usually do an overcut to get squared corners. As usual, do a test cut!!  

So what do you do if you don't have a Cameo Portrait, Cameo 3 or 4?  You can use scissors to cut it out. Or a craft knife.

You can use other brands of cutters by saving the design as an SVG.  

The important item to note is that the free version of Silhouette studio doesn't support saving SVG's, you must upgrade to Silhouette Studio Business Edition. 

But to be honest, it's an amazing program for around $60, easy to use, save and then cut with your other brand of cutter. You'd just skip adding the registration marks here and add them in your cutter's cut program. 

Hope this post gives you tons of ideas.  I'm making a dozen of these to hand out to the ladies of a book club that have invited me as their guest next month.

I'm putting my tag line, Live The Adventure ~ Love The Romance© and my website addy onto a Mint stamp, which will soon have its own tutorial right here at An Indie Adventure Blog.

Happy Creating

~L.A.