All Things Dixiefied: Silhouettes

I’m so excited to share the silhouettes I made our moms for Christmas. They turned out so cute and I can’t wait to make myself some.

All-in-all they were pretty easy…time consuming, yes a bit, but pretty easy.

I basically followed a tutorial on the Silhouette SD website. Here we go…

I took profile pictures of my kids before bed one night.

When I uploaded them on the Silhouette program I had to resize them a bit to the size I wanted.

I traced the outline of their head, but with their hair the outline was a little off.

The Silhouette site said all I had to do was pick the “end points”, delete them, and make the lines straight.

{I’ve tried several ways to put all these steps from my Silhouette program on here, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to do that…again, not that computer savvy.}

The Silhouette directions made it seem very simple. Well, it wasn’t hard, it was just very time consuming. There were hundreds of little grey boxes – end points – around the outline. Some were unwanted specs, and hairs, and such…all had to go.

Let’s just say I got real friendly with the left mouse button and the “delete end point” button.

After a while I finally had the outline I wanted…they were perfect.

I installed some vinyl into my Silhouette machine and cut.

Dallas helped me a lot with this project. I made the actual vinyl silhouettes, but she helped with the wood frames.

I had some left over wood from art boards I made a while back. I had Eric cut me four 10x10 boards.

I sanded them real good with the electric sander.

Dallas and I made up a white wash paint by watering down some paint we already had and she went to work.

But once dry I wasn’t completely happy with them.

I painted two with some bronze glaze I bought for some Christmas crafts. It had a little green tint to it. I put it on real thin and when it dried you could see some of the white wash through the bronze.

I mixed up a couple of brown craft paints and added a bit of the bronze glaze and painted the other two real thin as well.

I purchased some 12x12 scrapbook paper and cut them to 8x8. I then used Modge Podge and put them on the boards. When they were dry I took some fine sandpaper and sanded the edges of the paper a bit to make it look a little worn.

After cutting the vinyl silhouettes I placed them in the middle of the paper. Of course Dallas always wears a hair bow so I cut a couple of bows out on vinyl as well and placed it on hers.

They were finished!