help ✂ Templatemaker ︎

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About

Create and download custom sized papercraft and packaging templates for free! You don‘t even need to make an account to start using these free printables straight away.

This site offers a practically unlimited amount of templates (also knows as ’dielines‘ or ‘nets’) for paper craft, packaging, package design, learning materials, decoration and much more.

All the models are custom sized. Usually, that includes the length, width and height of an object. Some models also have some angles you can customise or a number of facets.

After entering the right dimensions, you can download the models in a variety of formats. PDF will be most likely be the easiest, so you can start printing, cutting and folding straight away.
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help
Help (and Frequently Asked Questions)

Despite my best efforts, there are still many things that can go wrong.

Maybe the answer is in my list of Frequently Asked Questions

To name a few:
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privacy

Privacy statement

I care about your privacy. I don’t like Big Corporations spying on me and I can only assume you don’t like it either.

Yet, if you visit my site, some information might be gathered and used, so let me explain what this information is and how it is used.

Summary

Benign cookies are used for marketing and making money. If you give me your mail address, I will only use it to communicate with you. If you give me a donation, a record of it is kept at PayPal and Ko-Fi.

Read the complete privacy statement
license

License, legal stuff, copyright

Site design, drawings and templatemaker software are COPYRIGHT by M. H. van der Velde.

All generated templates are COPYRIGHT by M. H. van der Velde 2019 but permission is hereby granted to print and even mass-produce the templates, also commercially, as long as they are used for packaging or educational purposes.

Re-publication in print or any digital medium, including internet, is not allowed!

This basically means: do anything you want with the templates you download from my site, but do not compete directly with my site using my own templates.

Read more about the license

Help (and Frequently Asked Questions)

The template is too big for my printer!

Yes. Quite likely, it is. Boxes need quite a lot of paper, there is not much I can do about it. But, here are some suggestions:

Find a larger printer. Either use a copy shop, or buy yourself a A3 printer. You can also print at, say, 50%, and use a copy shop to enlarge the template with 200%. (Note that if you want to enlarge from A4 to A3, you need to scale with 141%. And, from A3 to A4 is 70.7%)
If you need a plain, straight box: use the multi-sheet box template.
If the template is only slightly bigger then the sheet, you might still tweak it to fit. From the detail page of a template, choose the paper size (Letter or A4, most likely). You will see a preview of the template at the right-hand side. Maybe you can decrease the size of the glue flaps to make it just fit. Also, note that glue flaps need not be perfect. If these end up in the unprintable margin of your sheet, then it doesn’t matter. You can always draw them with a pencil before cutting.
Create 'tiles'. First, for the paper size, choose the paper size that your printer can hangle. Then, from the list of file formats (PDF, SVG, etc.), choose TILES. This will create a multi-page PDF with overlapping tiles that you can assemble. See this example video
For the cone-template, you can easily reconstruct the template on a large sheet using the calculated dimensions given on the top of the template: draw two concentric circles with the given radii, one horizontal line and diagonal line, originating in the centre of the circles. The angle of the two straight lines is also given on the top of the page.

The dimensions are off!

This happens a lot when you print from PDF, because Windows or Mac tries to ‘help’ you by scaling your document. So, from the print menu, turn scaling off or (equivalently) set scaling to 100%.

Also, it helps to choose the page size for the paper that you will be printing on. For example, “A4” or “US Letter”.

For Silhouette Studio: by default, when a DXF is imported, it is scaled to fit your paper size. This is very inconvenient. So, turn this setting of. From the main window, choose 'Edit' → Preferences → Import → DXF. Under 'open', choose “As is”

How do I open your files in Silhouette Studio (the free edition) ?

The payed versions (Silhouette Studio Designer edition) can open PDF files and SVG files. The free (OEM) edition can not. But, it can open DXF files. So, you can choose the DXF-option from the listed file formats. Because of the limited DXF support of Silhouette Studion, all lines will be imported with the same color. Either you have to select all the fold lines by hand and give them their own color and cutting-settings. Or, you can choose to download a “perforated DXF”, where all the fold lines will be created as perforated cut lines. (The machine will sound like it‘s trhowing a house-party when cutting these.)

Be sure to import the DXF in the correct size, see previous chapter.

How do I create beautiful artwork from your templates?

You would need a vector-editor. The most famous one is Illustrator (from Adobe), but you can also try your hand at Inkscape. It’s free, open source and works on all platforms. I really recommend it!

How do I open my files in Cricut?

From Templatemaker.nl, choose 'Cricut' as the file format.

In Cricut, start a new project.
Choose ‘upload’ from the toolbar on the left.
Choose ‘upload image’.
You can either drag the file you just downloaded into the ‘drop zone’, or press ‘Browse’ and find it on your computer.
Cricut will show you a preview of the image.
Choose ‘upload’ from the lower right corner.
You should see a series of ’thumbnails’ at the bottom of your screen under ‘Recent Uploads’.
Select the template and press ‘Insert Images’.

Cricut can also read the DXF and Perforated DXF file formats.

Cricut messes up my templates. It is just a random bunch of lines now?

After importing, select the whole template and click on the attach button. This should keep the paths in their proper place.

My files are opened in the wrong program! (Windows)

Maybe this helps?