Object on Path is a great feature you’ll find in the Replicate panel that allows you to take any shape and put it on a path. You need to start with an object you want to put to a path and a shape to become the path. I’ll show this a few ways and how you can make adjustments. First, we’ll start with this star and this circle. Select the star and go to the third tab of the Replicate panel.

Here you’ll click “Show Grab Handle” and the star will appear with a grab handle.

Drag this grab handle on the star over to the circle, and you’ll see it snaps in place and automatically fills the path.

At this point you’ll see two circular symbols. 

The first symbol does a couple of things. If you drag the tiny circle in the center when it turns red, you can drag your shapes and reposition them on the path. It doesn’t matter much on this circle, but if you’re using another design it can be helpful to choose a start position. The other function of this ring symbol is that you can split your replicated shapes to create an opening. Highlight just one half of the ring and drag it away. It snaps back together if you drag the ring halves together again.

This other symbol that just has a skinny black ring around the dot is for increasing or decreasing the spacing between your shapes, while automatically filling in or removing shapes to keep it evenly spaced.

Instead of using these two adjustment handles on the shapes themselves, you can use the Position input boxes on the lower portion of the panel to do the same thing. Those adjustment handles are affecting start position, section length, number of repeats, and step length.

Now let’s look at another shape of a path. For this path, we used a curved drawing tool to create this little swoosh so you can see your path does not need to be a closed shape like the circle. We want to create a string of leaves to follow this path, so we’ll select a leaf, click Show Grab Handle, and drag the handle on the leaf over to the curve.This might look good as it is, but watch what happens when we change the angles.

We’ll change the start angle and the increment angle.

Unchecking the box for Perpendicular makes all the shapes parallel to each other, which we don’t particularly like for this path but it might look good with other designs.

It’s generally a good idea to use shapes that are quite a bit smaller than the path you want to drag them to, and not all shapes are a good choice for a path, especially if it has lines that are close to each other. These large black stars don’t look good on this curly arrow, but the small stars look pretty good.

“Release Copies” at the bottom of the panel removes the ability to edit on the path but does let you manipulate individual pieces.

Just a note: Once a shape becomes a path, that path will not cut. Only the object you dragged to the path will cut.

You can drag grouped sets of shapes over to a path, too. Experiment and have fun!

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial on Object to Path, which is available in all editions of Silhouette Studio® version 4 and higher.