TUTORIAL: How to Cut Leather with Your Silhouette

Last year, I shared my leather wallet project on Instagram and you could see me cutting leather with my Silhouette Portrait 3. I got questions about the settings that I answered privately, but I still haven’t mustered the courage to write an article about it.

This year, I even managed to pre-cut the stitching marks, so I want to share that with you. I have a Silhouette Portrait 3, but it will be the same with other Silhouette machines.

For this, you’ll need:

• a Silhouette cutting mat that isn’t too new. Leather is messy, so it would be a shame to ruin a brand new mat for that. Use an old cutting mat, that’s enough.
• masking tape to firmly stick the edges of the leather to the cutting mat; this tape won’t damage the leather but is sticky enough.
• leather with a maximum thickness of 1mm
• a standard cutting blade

I don’t use a special blade. It’s the same one that comes with the machine. However, I buy an extra one that I use only for leather. This way, the blade for leather is used less often and therefore less worn out.

You need to put masking tape around the leather to keep it in place. This is even more important if the leather is in the area where there are two carriage rings. If that area isn’t smooth, the mat may be mispositioned during cutting and you’ll mess up your cut.

Here you can see that my stitching holes are in gray and the outline is in red. To learn how to draw these stitching marks, you can follow the tutorial below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG-nV_OgKrw

The trick is to cut the stitching holes first (gray line). So you need to run the cut for the gray color first, then the red color (outline).

For the gray color (the holes), here are my settings to ensure the blade cuts through the leather properly and that I don’t need to go over it with a pricking iron. As you can see, the trick is to go very slowly, repeat multiple passes, and have maximum blade depth.

For the outline, I only do 2 passes. I check before removing the mat if the leather is well cut. But I’ve noticed that 2 times is enough. If needed, you can do a 3rd pass if your leather is very thick.

I hope these settings will be useful to you. In any case, cutting with the machine saves me so much time and my work is also more precise.