Silhouette Art | I Tri and Craft

July 2, 2014
by Dawn Marie 5 Comments

Star and Shark USA Flag Shirt

I had thought I was very cleaver making my four-year old a Capt. America shirt for him to wear on July 4th.

Till I showed him and he said “I don’t yike Capt. America now”

hmmm….

OK back to the drawing board.

This time around I decided to take a sailors approach to the flag. Because I saw Lauren’s post (The Thinking Closet) about her Nautical Star Banner. I just loved the nautical star and thought it would look great on a shirt. But I didn’t want plain old boring stripes….

hmm….what to do….

shark_mask_grn

Then my son picks these out at the store. “I’m a SHARK! dana dana dana”

So my brain clicked and this shirt was born. Just in the nick of time.

My original plan was to do the stencil with freezer paper, because it makes a tighter seal and crisper lines.. But the cuts are too intricate for my dull blade. So I used vinyl, and as you can see some of the detail, like the gills was lost, and the edges are a little blurred.

The tricky part to this shirt is all the small pieces, I didn’t want to lay every little piece of freezer paper down one at a time. I thought I would share how I connected all the parts to make one complete stencil. Lauren also talks about how to do this in her afore-mentioned post.

First find the FREE images you want to use and trace them. (Please be mindful of copyright laws, and other people’s art work)

Draw lots of little rectangles using the rectangle tool. Place them on top, over the two parts you want connected. Select everything, go to the modify window and click on subtract. Then select everything again and click on make, under compound path.

If you go to the color fill tool box and fill your shape with a color, you can easily see you now have a star that has missing parts. The parts that are colored is what will be painted on the shirt.

After tracing the shark, we do the same thing. Make rectangles, go to modify and click subtract.

Then, under compound path, click make (after selecting all parts of the shark). You will see that when I traced the shark, I made sure that the gills and eye were part of the white portion. This eliminates a bunch of little eyes having to be added after the stencil is laid down.

Draw a large rectangle, the size that you want your flag. Use the replicate and alignment tool boxes to fill the rectangle with your stars and stripes.

The row of … and column of…were especially useful in this design. As was the space vertically and space horizontally tools in the alignment tool box.

Now select everything, the outer rectangle, all the sharks and all the stars, go to the modify window and click on make compound path.

Of course this removes all the fill colors you have used, but that’s ok.

If you click on a fill color now, you will see that all the parts that will be your stencil are now colored. These are the parts that the shirt will show through.

You can look closely and see all the parts are connected and will come off in one piece.

Cut, apply to shirt, paint, etc. You know the drill.

Got all that?

Well don’t worry, I decided to just let you download this cut file. For free. Yep. Go ahead and make your own. Tonight. Cause the fourth is coming soon.

Star and Shark USA Flag Stencil file

I used vinyl as my stencil, but you can also use freezer paper (just make sure your blade is sharp) or stencil material would work great.

My older son wouldn’t wear it…

so I made the baby try it on

Thanks for visiting
Shine On

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June 26, 2014
by Dawn Marie Leave a comment

Thank You Coach Gift and a Giveaway for Silhouette Goodies

I can make anything with paper, but vinyl still scares me.

What about you? Do you vinyl?

If not here is your chance to try! I have teamed up with some other wonderful bloggers to give you a chance to win a gift certificate to purchase some vinyl and other awesome Silhouette goodies.

Silhouette giveaway graphic prizes

T-Ball is over, which makes me a little sad. This year I volunteered to be the parent that took care of getting a thank you gift for our coaches.

I collected money and went out and purchased gift certificates for a self-serve frozen yogurt store. I used sketch pens in my Silhouette Cameo to write the sentiment and dollar amount on the gift certificate.

Looks way better than my own hand writing! I of course had to make envelopes out of fun baseball paper to hold the certificates.

I used my Cameo to cut out the envelopes and I also cut out “Thanks Coach” and glued it to the front of the envelope.

Of course being the over-achieving-silhouette-owner that I am, that just wasn’t enough.

I recently talked about my new love of glass etching and thought how awesome it would be to etch a picture frame with the word “Coach” and have a spot for the team picture and a spot with some baseball subway art.

I made up the subway art in a horizontal 5×7″ size, as our team pictures were also 5×7″. I thought I could find a frame with two horizontal 5×7″ spots, but in a vertical orientation.

Boy was I wrong! All the pre-cut mats for horizontal pictures were horizontal, making a long picture. That just would look good with what I had in mind.

I found these (buy one get one free!) frames that had a horizontal 5×7 and lots of blank space. And I realized I could do the subway art with vinyl!

I used vinyl as a stencil to etch the word “coach” in the glass. Vinyl is such a great etching stencil, it gives nice clean edges so none of the etching cream leaks under the stencil.

I had to do an offset of the text, to get the look I wanted. I etched it on the inside of the glass, so the outside is all smooth.

The colors of our baseball organization are blue and yellow, so I used blue vinyl for the subway art. It was so easy to apply, and it gives it a look that says “this is the way I purchased them at the store.”

I forget how easy vinyl is to work with, my mind always first goes to paper. What can I make out of paper? Maybe now I will ask “Can I make that out of vinyl?”

I can’t over how easy this project was! Although, if you notice in the bottom left corner it just says “base” with a blank space before it, I did have some difficulty with fonts. It really says “1st, 2nd, 3rd” but the font was too thin, so I had to redo it in a different font. But that was just a minor flaw, and was quick to fix.

I also made some cupcake toppers for our end of the season party, to go on the cupcakes my sister made. (but they are made from paper)

The frosting on the cupcakes looks like grass, cause you know, that’s what the field is.

Ian and his trophy at the end of the T-Ball season

Now it’s your turn to make something!

I’ve teamed up with some amazingly crafty women to allow you a chance to get some vinyl, from Expressions Vinyl and My Vinyl Direct, and other goodies including a fabric blade and interfacing. There will be one grand prize winner and three runners-up.

Enter below for your chance to win a gift certificate for some vinyl and a whole bunch of Silhouette goodies!

You only have to enter on one of our blogs, but be sure to check them all out.

Use the Rafflecopter link below to enter the giveaway

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Good luck & Shine On

June 24, 2014
by Dawn Marie 3 Comments

Rainbow Brite Baby Shower

Hooray for Baby Season!

I love hosting baby showers and birthday’s and well any party really. I don’t want to toot my own horn (OK, yes I do), but my sister and I throw some amazing parties.

One of my cousins, Bailey was expecting her first baby this month. Our other cousin Darcy wanted to throw Bailey a shower, with the help of my sister and me.

A little background information for you, I have a boat load of cousins. And it can kinda get confusing, as there are two that I am going to talk about, but they are not sisters, they are also cousins.

The three of us started brainstorming about themes, my sister and Darcy throwing down some great 80’s cartoon themes. When Darcy says ‘Oh, I know! Rainbow Brite!’

A little side note: when Bailey found out they were having a girl she said “…she will wear and use anything that she is given but if you have color choices, go easy on the pink please we like the whole rainbow” so a rainbow theme was just perfect for her. Plus there was a whole ton of Rainbow Brite playing going on whilst growing up.

So to work I went on the invitations. I had less than a week to design, cut and send them out, so I went with a simple design. We also kept the theme secret from the Mom-to-be. That was really fun. I of course use my Silhouette Cameo to make the invitations and other decorations.

I cut out different colored circles in various sizes and sewed them together. This was my first time sewing paper, and I am now hooked!

We really wanted some tissue paper pom-poms and decided to make some ourselves. We got some tissue paper packs from the dollar store, instead of separating the tissue paper by color we decided to make them rainbows too.

I think we bought two or three packs, and made about nine small ones and four large ones. More than a dozen pom-poms for $3!

They look great all clustered together.

Of course I also had to make some rosettes, my other favorite party decoration. I used plain colored card-stock and matched each of the Color Kids to the color of the rosette. On the other side of the rosette the circle is the Sprite that matched the Color Kid.

For the banner I cut out onesies and rainbow letters that “Welcome Baby” as the parents had not decided on a name yet. For the banner spacers I used images of a few Rainbow Brite characters on the onesies.

At the last shower we threw (for a different cousin) we gave these Cookie-in-a-Jar gifts, and everyone said they made wonderful cookies. So we decided to do it again. We made 40 of them….

Luckily my mom had tons of rainbow-colored fabric to use on the lids. We decided to use mini M&M‘s, instead of chocolate chips, because they were the most rainbow like candy. The tags I made using my Silhouette and I was able to print on both sides of the tags. The back has the instructions for baking.

My most favorite decoration was the rainbow backdrop on the food table.

I still love looking at pictures of the backdrop.

Remember all those circles I sewed together? This is where they ended up. Looks great huh?

We tried to stick to the rainbow theme with the food as well.

Luckily Mother Nature loves colors as much as we do. The two bowls of marshmallows are the clouds that border the fruit rainbow. And of course there is a bowl of Skittles on the table.

We wanted to make a diaper cake, and just in time, SVG Cuts came out with this Tiny Miracle kit that had a diaper castle. Rainbow Brite’s castle was yellow and had rounded tops, not pointed ones. If I had more time, I might have tried to adjust the tops, but the castle still looked great as it was.

Although I didn’t take pictures of the food tent labels, they also matched the rainbow theme.

My sister made these wonderful rainbow cupcakes. To which I added the cupcake toppers with all the characters.

I also made the mom-to-be a souvenir invitation and framed it for her. My mom had a couple of dolls, that belonged to my nieces, so we added them to the decor.

My sister made some gluten-free chocolate cupcakes and some that were rainbow inside.

Oh, so yummy!

And of course here is my cousin in all her pregnant glow!

The guests played present bingo, when mom-to-be opens a present, you get to mark in on a Bingo card. It is a fun way to get everyone involved in the presents and we play it at all our showers.

My cousin was just thrilled when she came and saw the theme and all the decorations. Her baby girl has since arrived and everyone is doing wonderfully.

Happy Party Planning

June 16, 2014
by Dawn Marie 7 Comments

Surprise at the bottom Etched Drinking Glasses

Way back in the late 90’s my sister got married and I helped her make the bridal party gifts. She wanted to order etched beer mugs for the groomsmen and I told her we could just do it ourselves. So we went to the craft store and bought this:

Armour Etch Starter Kit

You see the rose wine glass? We made those for the bridesmaids. And the kit hasn’t changed in the almost 20 years since we bought it.

It was a pain! You tape the stencil to the glass and the etching cream bleeds through and smears and it isn’t pretty.

But guess what….I now have a Silhouette Cameo that cuts vinyl. And vinyl makes the perfect stencil for glass etching. They also make stencil material that has a sticky back, or you could use contact paper.

So while searching Pinterest one day I saw some glasses that state “you have just been poisoned” at the bottom of them. I just knew I wanted to make some, and I knew the perfect machine to make a really good stencil.

After getting my Silhouette Cameo for Christmas I joined a Facebook group that has allowed me to learn how to use my machine, share my projects, help others learn how to use their machine and push me to try new things.

One of the events they hosted this year was a hand-made gift exchange. Whomever in the group wanted to participate just signed up and the coordinator matched you with another group member. You then made each other a hand-made gift. Sounds like fun, huh?

After chatting with my gift receiver I thought she might just be the person to appreciate this fun gift. To the Silhouette I go!

I measured the bottom of the glasses. It is important when looking for drinking glasses that the bottom of the glass be completely flat. Typically when etching on the outside of glass you don’t need to flip the image, but with this design it will be read through the bottom of the glass, so it needs to be flipped on the horizontal.

Cut your stencil out of vinyl, others have had success with contact paper, but I have yet to try it as a stencil. I used the default vinyl settings and it cut perfectly.

Clean the glassware and wipe with rubbing alcohol. When completely clean and dry apply stencil.

Follow the instructions on the glass etching cream you have purchased. The etching process is pretty quick to apply it next you a running water source. That way if you happen to get any on your skin you can quickly rinse it off.

Please remember this is a caustic substance and can eat away at your skin. Be safe and use precaution and proper safety gear. Gloves are highly recommended, as is a well ventilated work area next to running water. If you do happen to get some on your skin rinse under high flowing cold water for at least 15 minutes.

As per instructions I used a wooden stick to pile on a helping glob of cream and let it sit for about a minute. I then ran it under cold water until it was all rinsed off. If you are concerned about the cream etching your pipes, don’t be, but you can run cold water down your sink for 2-3 minutes if you want to ensure you have full diluted the cream.

I think they turned out pretty awesome, don’t you?

Now while these are awesome drinking glasses, I also wanted to make something a little more personal for her. My gift exchange partner is going to school to become a forensic investigator! What an awesome degree huh? So I decided to make her a some artwork that encompass that goal.