How to add weeding lines and a weeding box to a cut file

Weeding is peeling the vinyl you do not want away from the design after the cut. On a small single word it comes off in one piece. On a big decal, or on several lines of lettering, the waste is one large sheet, and as you peel it, it pulls at every small letter on its way past. Glitter and holographic vinyl tear easily, which makes it worse.

Two kinds of extra cut fix that. A weeding box is a rectangle cut round the whole design, so the waste has a clean edge to start from and the rest of the sheet stays on the roll. Weeding lines are cuts through the empty vinyl inside the box. They split the waste into smaller pieces, and each piece lifts away without dragging the letters next to it.

Where weeding lines should go

• Through the gaps that run right across the design. The space between two lines of text, or between two words side by side, is the natural place. A line there splits the waste into a top and a bottom piece, or a left and a right.
• In from the box edge. Short lines from each side of the box towards the design break up the border, so it comes away in sections rather than as one long strip that tears halfway round.
• Never into the design. Every line should stop a little short of the nearest letter, so the blade never nicks the vinyl you keep.
• Not between two letters of a word. A gap that narrow leaves a sliver of waste that tears, and a line there gains nothing.

The inside of a letter, such as the middle of an O or an A, is a separate small piece either way. Weeding lines do not help there: those pieces still come out with a weeding hook.

Step by step

1. Start from an SVG. Weeding lines belong in a cut file. If you have a PNG or JPG, turn it into an SVG first with the PNG to SVG converter.
2. Drop the SVG on the weeding lines tool. The file is read and drawn in your browser, and nothing is uploaded.
3. Check the design width. It is read from the file when the file says its size. When it does not, the tool reads it at 96 to the inch, the web standard, so type the width you will cut. Every distance below is worked out at that width.
4. Set the room round the design. This is the gap between the design and the box. The tool starts at 0.25 in.
5. Set how often lines come in from the box edge. The tool starts at every 1.5 in.
6. Set how close a line may come to the design. The tool starts at 1/32 in. Gaps narrower than about 0.15 in get no line through them, so no line squeezes between the letters of a word.
7. Download the SVG. Your design is copied in unchanged, with a weeding group added beside it. You can also download the weeding layer on its own and add it in your cutting software.
8. Keep the lines in place. In Cricut Design Space, select the design and the weeding group and click Attach, so they cut on one mat in the same places. Silhouette Studio opens them in place; keep them grouped if you move them.

These numbers are our starting points, not a machine maker's figures. A small design or thin letters may want less room and fewer lines. Change them to suit your vinyl.

An example

The sample on the tool page is two lines of lettering, "Hello" over "autumn", 6.5 inches wide. With the starting settings, the tool draws a box of about 7 by 4.7 inches and 11 weeding lines: one right across the gap between the two lines of text, four down from the top of the box, four up from the bottom and one in from each side. Each line stops short of the letters. The line across splits the waste in two, and the short lines let the border come away in sections.

Attach, not Weld

Attach keeps separate layers where you placed them when the project goes to the mat. Weld joins overlapping shapes into one cut shape, which is not what you want here: the weeding lines are cuts of their own and should stay that way. The post on Cricut Weld vs Attach explains the difference in more detail.

Why the lines are thin shapes

A weeding line in the file is a very thin filled shape, 0.01 in wide, rather than a plain line. Cutting programs do not all treat a plain stroke in an SVG the same way: some leave it out, and some cut round its width. A thin filled shape is cut along its outline in all of them, so each line cuts as two passes a hundredth of an inch apart, which leaves one slit in the vinyl.

Before you cut

• Check the size after uploading. If you resize the design in your cutting software, resize the design and the weeding group together, or the lines will no longer sit in the gaps.
• Look at the thinnest parts. Weeding lines help the waste come off; they do not make a thin letter stronger. The guide to tiny pieces and thin lines covers that.
• Cut a test on a scrap with the smallest lettering in the design, and weed it before you cut the full sheet.
• If the file will not upload, the SVG checker says why. The weeding tool does not fix files, weld letters or change your design.

If the design will not come off the backing at all once it is weeded, the problem is the transfer tape, not the weeding: see vinyl that will not lift from the liner.