October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and Silhouette is proud to partner with the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF) to bring you specially marked pink products, including a pink tool kit and a pink vinyl sampler pack. If you choose to purchase any of these products, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to NBCF.* We’ve also created a special design that you can add to almost anything you can think of to show your support for breast cancer awareness. We decided to create this breast cancer awareness phone decal using the vinyl available in the pink sampler pack. To see how you can make your own decal, follow along with this tutorial.

Supplies Needed:

Step One: Preparing the Design

1. Download the HOPE BELIEVE FIGHT design (Design ID #276776) from the Silhouette Design Store. Open it in Silhouette Studio® by locating it in your Library. Resize it so that it will fit your phone case.

2. Use the Knife tool to cut your design above and below the banner and delete parts that are currently hidden underneath the banner. We are doing this in order to avoid visual bumps after we apply the vinyl. To access the Knife tool in the Silhouette Studio®, select the Knife icon on the left of your screen. After selecting a knife, click and drag from one side of the shape to the other and release your mouse.

Move the banner piece aside for the moment. Delete the cut parts where the banner previously was. Then put the banner back in place.

3. Our design has different colors, and we need to make sure we can line everything up after cutting the vinyl. To do this, we’ll create registration marks. Registration marks for a vinyl cut design are simply a couple of shapes that we’ll put above the design to cut with every layer. We will type a lowercase x and make a duplicate by holding the Alt key while clicking and dragging a copy of the x over to the other side. Select both of the x letters and line them up by going to the Transform panel and clicking on the Vertical alignment option.

3. Group both of the x letters together and make a copy of them. Place copied x letters on top of the original ones. Holding Shift, select the copies of the x letters and the parts of circles, and then place all those pieces aside. Repeat the same steps for part of the ribbon, hearts, words and banner. Group each set together. Place each set on the working space.

Step Two: Cutting the Vinyl

1. Place pieces of dark pink, light pink, silver metallic, glitter pink vinyl from the vinyl sampler pack and the silver Oracal 651 vinyl on the mat on the same spots as you placed designs on the working space in the Silhouette Studio®. Make sure the pieces of vinyl are not smaller than your designs. Adjust the rollers if needed, and feed the mat into the cutting machine.

2. Select all the sets you are going to cut from the same type of the vinyl and color the lines the same color. (Remember that it doesn’t matter what colors you select here because you’re cutting the designs out of the colored vinyl. The colors in Silhouette Studio® just help you distinguish what parts of the design need certain cut settings.) Go to the Send panel, choose the Action by: Line tab, choose “Vinyl, Glossy” as the material for the designs you are going to cut from glossy vinyl. Then repeat the same process for the glitter and metallic vinyl. The cut settings for glitter vinyl are Blade 3, Speed 5, Force 15, and Passes 1. The cut settings for metallic vinyl are Blade 2, Speed 5, Force 17, and Pass 1. If you use a Cameo 2, a Portrait, or another machine without an AutoBlade, add pauses between each line (right click > add pause) so that you have time to manually adjust the blade depth. After you set up all of the cut settings, click “Send.”

3. Once the images are cut, select Unload on your machine and remove the vinyl pieces from the cutting mat.

4. Weed (peel away) the negative space so all that remains on the vinyl backing is your design.

Step Three: Applying the Vinyl

1. We’ll use the strong tack transfer tape to pick up the top layer first, including the registration marks. Now place the vinyl back on the vinyl backing to cover everything but the registration marks, and this lets us place our design on the next layer without accidentally touching it to the layer below it before we’re ready.

2. Line up the registration marks, and then peel the backing away.

3. Repeat for each layer.

4. Now our design is ready to apply to the phone case. You can remove the registration mark cutouts before applying the decal since we don’t need them any more.

That’s all there is to it! Now you have a unique phone decal that you can use to show your support for those fighting against breast cancer.

*To help support NBCF, we are donating a portion of the proceeds from specially marked pink products—including the pink toolkit and the pink vinyl sampler pack—to NBCF from September to November.