Make it weed without tearing.
Upload an image. Get closed cut paths sized so the negative space survives the weed.
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Real vector craft — see for yourself
Your trace lands as genuine, editable SVG paths — the same clean vector work behind Clearly’s bee-ecosystem murals. Infinitely scalable, every path editable, ready for Cricut, print or the web. No embedded pixels, no tangled auto-trace mess.
Hand-authored on the Clearly canvas · editable SVG, not raster.
The limit is not what the blade can cut — it is what you can pull away afterwards
A vinyl cutter will happily follow a path a fraction of a millimetre wide. The problem arrives afterwards, at the weeding table, when you peel away everything that is not the design. Thin isolated slivers of negative space stretch and tear rather than lifting cleanly, and once one tears you are usually recutting the sheet. So the governing constraint is the width of the *gaps*, not the width of the shapes — which is the reverse of how people design, and the reason an intricate design that cuts perfectly can still be unusable.
What a vinyl cutter needs from the file
- Minimum negative gap
- ≈1 mm for standard adhesive vinyl. Thinner slivers tear on weeding.
- Paths
- Must be closed. An open path leaves the shape attached to the sheet.
- HTV
- Mirror horizontally before cutting — it is applied face down.
- Colours
- One sheet per colour, aligned with registration marks.
- Counters
- Letter interiors (O, A, e) weed separately — keep them large enough to handle.
- Strokes
- Converted to outlines. A cutter follows a contour, not a line weight.
How it works
Flat, high-contrast artwork cuts best. Photos are not vinyl material.
Look at the spaces between elements in the preview. Those are what you will be pulling away.
Heat transfer vinyl is cut on the back and applied face down. Adhesive vinyl is not mirrored.
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FAQ
Because the negative spaces are too thin, not because the shapes are. Vinyl stretches before it tears, so a sliver a few tenths of a millimetre wide will deform and snap rather than lift. Roughly 1 mm of gap is the practical floor for standard adhesive vinyl.
For heat transfer vinyl, yes — it is cut on the carrier and pressed face down, so the design must be reversed. For standard adhesive vinyl applied face up, no.
Yes, but each colour is a separate sheet and separate weed, aligned with registration marks when you layer them. Colour count drives the labour more than the material cost.
Yes. Both read SVG, and both need closed paths. Silhouette Studio's free tier historically restricted SVG import, so check your version if the file will not open.