One of the most popular craft projects is the tag, because of its small size and versatility. As a digital designer for the craft industry, you will need a basic tag cut file to use as a starting point for many projects.

If you take a look at Pinterest^R and other sharing sites, you will see that crafters are creating little works of tag art in any size and shape. Sometimes there is a hole at the top or side, which needs to be large enough for string, ribbon, aged binding, eyelash twine and more. You will also want to include the basic shape for the hole reinforcer, which can be used as a design element.

The basic tag cut file that we will make in this tutorial will be 5.5 inches high and 3.5 inches wide. This will make it the perfect size to be used with any of the popular 6 x 6 inches decorative paper pads available on the market. The hole will be your traditional .25 inch diameter and the hole reinforcer will be .5 inch diameter with a .25 inch hold. The Silhouette^R Studio Designer Edition software, which I design cut files for most of the time, will recognizes a .1 pt path with the color value #000001 in the SVG file, that we will create for use with the Silhouette Cameo.

1. I usually start a new SVG cut file in Illustrator^R that is 12 x 12 inches and 300 DPI. This gives me the workspace to draw just about anything.
   
   
2. The first step is to set the Stroke Color to #000001 and the Stroke Weight to .1 pt. Set the Fill color to null.
   
   Once you start joining and combining paths, it becomes tricky to maintain the .000001 color. So drawing all lines in this color from the start of the project will save you much time and frustration.
   
   Now we are ready to draw. Let’s draw a rectangular tag.
   
   
3. Select the Rectangle tool and click on the workspace. In the pop up box, set the Width to 3.5 inches and the Height to 5.5 inches. Click OK.
   
   This is the cut path for the shape of the tag. Drag it to the center of the workspace. Let’s create a cut path for the reinforcer.
   
   
4. Click on the workspace with the Ellipse tool. In the pop up box, set the Width and Height to .5 inch and click OK.
   
   This is the cut line for the outside of the circular reinforcer. Drag it to the side of the tag on the workspace. Now we need to add the cut path for the hole in the center of the reinforcer.
   
   
5. Repeat the previous step to create another circular path. But this time set the Width and Height to .25 inch.
   
   
6. Drag the small circle (the cut line for the hole) to the center of the larger circle (reinforcer), matching the two center points.
   
   Let’s make a copy of the cut path for the hole for the tag. In that way, the holes will match when the crafter places the reinforcer on top of the tag.
   
   
7. Select only the small circle and click Edit - Copy. Click Edit - Paste to get a second circle. Drag the copy to the top of the tag, about 3/8 inch from the top edge. The reinforcer will be placed 1/4 inch from the top edge.
   
   Now we need to combine these two paths into one cut path for the tag.
   
   
8. Select both the tag and its hole cut paths. Right-click and choose Create Compound Path from the pop up menu.
   
   
9. Repeat the previous step. Select the reinforcer and its hole cut paths. Create a compound path.
   
   

Save your file in both the .svg and .ai formats. Now we have a cut path for the tag and the reinforcer. But to keep organized, we could draw a few more tags in various shapes. With these all in the same starter file, we can grab the tag shape we need for each new project.

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