Learn how to make custom cupcake toppers to match any theme or holiday to cut with your Silhouette CAMEO. Using clip art and digital paper you can create stunning designs easily in Silhouette Studio!
This post is brought to you by our sponsor The Hungry Jpeg. We have been long time customers and used their products so much that we now partner with them to teach how we make our creations using their products. The tutorial you see below is created 100% by Kimber Dawn Co.
One of my favorite things to make with my Silhouette CAMEO is custom cupcake toppers. You can literally take any character, theme, or idea and make super cute cupcake toppers to match in just minutes!
You design them in Silhouette Studio, print them, cut them out with your Silhouette, pop them on a pick and stick them in some cupcakes. Then when you show up at an event, you look totally put together when you have these adorable matching cupcakes and everyone ohhhs and ahhhhs while you know that they were super simple to make. You can make them for birthdays, holiday parties, school events, pot lucks, or anywhere!
The key to making these is using clip art and digital papers. I often get the question in our Silhouette Facebook group if you can, or how you can, or even why you would use clip art with your Silhouette. Clip art is one of my favorite design tools to use with my Silhouette because you can make these completely awesome custom projects like these cupcake toppers in minutes!
One of my favorite places to get clip art, and where I got all of these is in the monthly bundle at The Hungry Jpeg. You can get tons of clip art and digital papers in every bundle and they come down to just pennies for each piece. I also love the bundles because each month usually has seasonal graphics in it. For example this month (October) is filled with Halloween and fall themed designs among other beautiful florals and other fun items. So it makes it easy and affordable to get great seasonal things you can design with for cupcake toppers, bunting banners, tags, scrapbook, or just decor for your home.
How to Make Custom Cupcake Toppers in Silhouette Studio
Today though we are going to specifically talk about how to design custom cupcake toppers. To start out, you need to do two things:
- Grab the free cupcake topper template I use at the bottom of this post
- Download the themed clip art and digital paper to your computer that you want use on the toppers.
You can make these toppers with both the basic edition of the Silhouette Software (the one that is free) and the Designer Edition of the software. It is much quicker with the functions of the Designer Edition, but definitely doable with both.
Here is a video I made on how to design them in the software with each version I have:
If you have the basic edition of the Silhouette Studio Software, watch this video:
If you have the Designer Edition of the Silhouette Studio Software, watch this video:
To recap, the basic steps to designing:
- Open the topper template
- Fill the back circle with the design you want (see how to do this specific to your version in the video tutorials)
- Open the clip art you want to add to the topper and place it on each topper. (Grab the Halloween Designs I used here!)
- Add any text to the toppers (see video for helpful hints)
- Make sure that only the outside circles are set to cut, and that everything else is set to no cut.
- Turn on registration marks
- Send design to printer (I like to print on a nice heavy weight cardstock)
- Put the cardstock on your Silhouette mat and load cutting mat, then send to Silhouette.
- Unload the mat. Then peel the toppers off the cutting mat.
- Place toothpicks or colored food picks on the back of the topper and secure with tape. Optional: place another cupcake topper cut out on the back to make them double sided.
- Stick them in your cupcakes and PARTY!
Free Cupcake Topper Template Download
If you watch the video and have questions leave them below and we will do our best to help! Happy Crafting!!
thank you for sharing this. I am new to all this and the biggest problem I’m having is sizing , I wish there were templates like this to help us out and get started. Thanks, I loved the video and plan on making some toppers for my next gathering.