Did you know that Silhouette Studio® has a Puzzle Generator? If you have Silhouette Studio® Design Edition Plus or higher and version 4.2 or above, you have access to a tool that turns any design into a puzzle! It is such a fun tool to create custom or personalized puzzles.
Supplies Needed:
- Silhouette Cameo® or Silhouette Portrait®
- Silhouette Studio®
- Silhouette Cutting Mat
- Silhouette AutoBlade or Silhouette AutoBlade for Cameo 4
- Chipboard
- Printable Vinyl or Printable Sticker Paper
- Design ID #283980, #284485, #284481, #284490 — You could just use one of these animal design collections, but I wanted to create a custom group of animals for my puzzle!
Step One: Formatting the Puzzle
1. Insert your design (or designs) into Silhouette Studio. Begin my right-clicking on the image and ungrouping the illustrations from the cut lines. You can delete the red cut lines because we’re just going to be printing the illustrations, not cutting around them.

2. Now you can keep the illustration exactly as is, or if you want to combine illustrations from multiple design files, use the knife tool to cut around each individual animal. Select Knife Tool on the left hand side toolbar, and make sure it’s set to “Solid” cut and “Freehand.”

This will allow you to rearrange and size each animal to your liking! I used this to create a custom arrangement of animals for each puzzle.
3. Change the page orientation and turn on registration marks.

4. Next, use the shape tool to create a rectangle with the slightly smaller dimensions than the registration marks—mine is 8.668 inches wide by 6.766 inches tall. Center this around your animals.

5. Use the fill panel to give the rectangle a background color. I used a yellow watercolor background. Make sure you send the rectangle to the back layer so it doesn’t cover up the animals.

6. To turn your design into a puzzle, open the puzzle panel on the right-hand side. Click “Select Puzzle Area” and draw a box around your puzzle design, just slightly inside the boundaries of your border to make sure you don’t cut anything off.

This will enable the Puzzle Layout and Settings options, where you can choose how many pieces your puzzle has and if you want your puzzle pieces to have curves or not. This basically determines how difficult or easy your puzzle is!
The yellow puzzle above has more pieces with a “curvature,” and the below puzzle has fewer pieces with no curves. Play around with what you want your design to be!

Step Two: Print & Cut Your Puzzle
1. Now print your animal design (not the puzzle cut lines), on a sheet of printable vinyl. Again make sure your registration marks are on and your printing on the right side of the vinyl.
2. Once printed, peel off the liner of the vinyl and adhere to your piece of chipboard, aligning the page in a corner.

3. Load into the machine, with the registration marks in the upper left hand corner. Cut the puzzle pieces out using the chipboard cut settings. You may need to increase the blade depth by one to accommodate the vinyl, but do a test cut because the basic chipboard settings might work depending on the newness of your blade.

4. Remove the extra material, and your puzzle is ready for its maiden voyage!


Tina Johnson
January 12, 2020
I love this tutorial! I’m going to try this soon! On your list of supplies, you have strong adhesive. Where is that used?
Silhouette
January 13, 2020
Oh that was just a mistake! No adhesive necessary! Excited for you to try this out!
ashling talbot
January 17, 2020
Hi, with the making puzzles, can you make puzzles from photographs with this?
I am currently only setting up, and looking into what is best to buy
Silhouette
January 20, 2020
Yes! You can absolutely make it with photographs! You’ll just open the photograph file within Silhouette Studio and then follow the same steps to making the image into a puzzle.
Rene
January 17, 2020
This looks so fun! Where do you get the chipboard & how thick is it?
Thank you!
Silhouette
January 20, 2020
So glad you like it! We used our own brand of chipboard for this project, which you can purchase HERE! It is .4 mm thick.
Rene
January 20, 2020
Thank you! Can the Silhouette handle thicker chipboard, if so, how thick? Thanks again!
Silhouette
January 20, 2020
Yes! The AutoBlade can cut materials up to 1 mm thick. Then if you have the Kraft Blades, you can cut up to 2 or 3 mm thick depending on which one you buy.
Rene
January 20, 2020
Thank you for all of the information!
Alexis Garza
March 25, 2020
How can I upgrade to the design edition plus? I have a basic edition 4.3.
Silhouette
March 27, 2020
Hello Alexis! You can purchase the Designer Edition Plus key here: https://www.silhouetteamerica.com/shop/STUDIOPLUS. And then to apply the key, please open Silhouette Studio, select Help> Upgrade