What the Heck is Pouncing?

by Sandy McCauley | Jun 11, 2008 | Dashed Line Cutting, Pouncing

Today’s blog covers Pouncing in KNK Studio, with some tips about using it. First off, pouncing is the exact same thing as dashed line cutting or perforating in other programs. Instead of a solid cut line, you get dashes cut and you can specify how long the dashes will be and their spacing. Some applications for this would be:

1. Fold up projects, such as gift boxes, bags, and pop-up cards.
2. Adding dashed cuts to the interior of your die cuts for dimension, such as you see with the Sizzix dies.
3. In paper piecing, dashed cuts on the main background piece can serve as guides for placing the other cuts you glue on top. (Thanks to Klo Oxford for this great idea!)

To do pouncing:

First, pouncing must be done in Sign Blank mode. Otherwise, if you are using Page mode, the pounced lines will be sent to the origin for pouncing and then the cut lines will be sent to the origin for cutting and they will NOT line up! Thus, go to Cut>Plotting Defaults, and check Sign Blank near the bottom. Then click on Save Default and click on OK.

Next, select the lines to be pounced and change their color. For example, in the image to the right, the black line will be cut and the blue line will be pounced.

When you enter the Cut Preview window, RIGHT click on the 6th icon from the right in the Cut Tools toolbar.

Enter the dash and space settings from the popup window:

Click on OK and make sure the Pounce icon is indented.

Then, if you have more than one image in your window, and you need to ONLY do the Pounce on one color, then click on the second icon from the right.

Uncheck the color you do NOT want to Pounce. In this case, we uncheck black. Then click on Cut.

After the line is pounced, then click on the Pounce icon to outdent (no longer indented), use the second icon from the right again to now uncheck the color you just pounced. In this case, the blue would now be unchecked. Click on Cut and your image will be cut.

That’s it!