We are so excited to welcome a new artist to the Silhouette Design Store® — Mesh&Craft. They specialize in Low Poly art, which is essentially a 3D paper puzzle. We have so much fun making and playing around with their designs. Today we are taking one of their designs and tweaking it to make an adorable snail night light!

Supplies needed:

Step One: Download Mesh&Craft Instructions and Parts Layout

1. Your first step will be to download and read the Instructions and Parts layout manual provided in the Silhouette Design Store®.

2. This can be found in the designs description in the Design Store. Click on the “Instructions” link found underneath the description. The instructions will begin to download.

3. Read these instructions thoroughly. They will walk you through the entire process in great detail.

Step Two: Open Design in Silhouette Studio®

1. Now open up your design (ID #291431) in Silhouette Studio®. It will appear like the image below. We have our page size set up to 8.5 x 11 inches.

2. The design will come in one giant group. You will want to ungroup only once. The artist has this set up so each page is already grouped so you can simply swap out each group into the cut field as you go.

3. The manual will show you which pieces you are cutting and how they correspond with the finished snail. We cut the shell in blue and the body in green. You can customize the colors as you wish.

4. Turn on the Print & Cut feature and center your design on the page. Making sure all the cut lines are within the cut field.

For a noncustom low poly design, you will simply send to the printer and then cut on your machine. We are going to customizes ours for a nightlight, so disregard the coloring and erasing steps and continue on to Step Three.

5. Selecting the bottom four pages (these are the shell pieces). One by one place each page in the cut window. Open the fill window and select white. This will color the design in the software but won’t print.

6. Now with the eraser tool and with the outline option selected, go through the design and click to create tiny dots throughout the design.

7. You can do sporadic dots or make mini constellation maps on your design. Just be sure not to erase over the fold lines.

8. Choose the Top Right page (page 4), and on the large piece, we will use the knife tool and create cut lines in the base of the snail. This is to add the light when the snail is complete.

Step Three: Print & Cut

1. Arranging each section in the cut field, send each page to the printer. Ensure that your registration marks are turned on (you can do this in the Page Setup panel. Make sure the cut lines are all within the cut field.

2. When all your pages have been printed, they will look like this. Tiny numbers on a page. You will not see any of the cut or fold lines. Those will be created by the blade.

3. The numbers are very small. And this will be the inside portion of the snail, the numbers will not show when the project is completed.

4. Load the page on the map and send to the machine.

Here is how your pieces will look if you did the star/hole modifications.

Step Four: Fold and Glue

1. Follow the instructions for folding provided in the manual.

2. There are two types of fold lines cut into your pieces. Dots or dots and dashes. Depending on the type of line you will either do a mountain fold (dots) or Valley fold (dots and dashes). Placing the printed number side down fold according to the lines.

3. Your pieces will look like the images below.

4. Now you will look at the numbers on the pieces and glue each tabbed number to the inside of the line number.

Step Five: Insert the Light

1. When all of your pieces are assembled, take your light and insert it into the cut lines we created using the knife tool in Silhouette Studio®.

Now when it’s time for lights out, you can snuggle up and gaze up on your favorite star constellations any time you and your little one want. What low poly animal would you make?