Free French curve SVG files

What a French curve is, and how these are made

A French curve is a template for drawing smooth curves that are not arcs of a circle. Its edges bend gently at one end and tightly at the other, so somewhere along an edge there is a stretch that fits the curve you want. You mark a few points, turn the template until an edge passes through three of them, draw that stretch, and move on.

These are our own shapes and do not match the numbered sets sold by drafting suppliers. Each is drawn along a spine whose curvature rises evenly along its length, the curve road and railway engineers use to ease into a bend, and given a width that swells and tapers. That makes every edge, inside and out, a curve without flat spots or kinks.

Cutting and using one

Cut them from 2 or 3 mm clear acrylic on a laser, which gives a clean edge to run a pen along and lets you see the drawing underneath. Plywood of 3 mm and stiff card of 400 gsm or more also work for pencil. The files are 100 mm on their longer side: scale the scroll and the S to 200 or 250 mm for drafting, and the hooked curve and the hip curve to 300 mm or more for pattern cutting. Scaling changes the radii in step, so a curve cut twice as long has edges twice as gentle.

How to open the files

• Cricut Design Space: choose Upload, pick the SVG, and add it to the canvas. Set the width you want; the shape is already welded.
• Silhouette Studio: Designer Edition and above open the SVG. The free Basic Edition does not, so open the DXF instead.
• LightBurn, xTool Creative Space and Glowforge: import the SVG, then set the layer to cut, score or engrave.
• Inkscape, Illustrator and Affinity: open the SVG. It is a plain filled path, so you can recolour it, add a stroke or combine it with your own work.
• Printing or sublimation: use the PNG, which has a transparent background.

Each design page lists the file’s narrowest part at seven sizes, so you can tell whether it will survive at the size you plan to cut.

Questions