I've gone a little silhouette crazy ya'll.
See! I'm saying ya'll! I must be crazy! Not that it's a bad thing to say, it's just, I haven't said ya'll in regular conversation since, well, since I moved form Texas to Oregon in High School and realized the boys thought helping a sweet little "southern girl" find her way around her new school was fun. (I was a theater geek, I couldn't resist!)
But seriously. Every since the Sunprint Silhouette project came out so well I've thought of five different things I could do with silhouettes. FIVE. And those are just the semi-practical, doable ones. I'm not even counting the weird ones (could you skywrite a silhouette?)
I won't go on and on with all five today (partly because I've only gotten as far as making two and partly because mother's day is coming up and, well, I don't want to spoil it for them :)) but I will show you this one because it's cute and I love it and it's sitting on my desk looking at me when I'm supposed to be writing about crafts you can do while you multi-task at a video conference. I'm easily distracted people.
This actually started out as a birthday card for my friend. I'd talked her kids into letting me take their profile pictures one weekend (well, two of them, the third I had to sneak in later) with the promise of making them t-shirts with their faces (that was silhouette project #1, which was totally cute by the way, can't go wrong with freezer paper stencils and little girls profiles!) but then I loved it so much I made one of my kids too.
Just as with the sunprint version, the trick is to get a good profile shot of your child. If you have a girl, by the way, hair up is the way to go. They just turn out better and offer more scope for cutting out little curls and wisps. I actually used the cutout's that I made for the sunprints since I ended up making about ten sunprints for each of my kids. It just never got old.
Using a piece of felt to keep the picture steady and for overrun, I painted the photos with a dark gray paint (black is the classic but I wanted to use funky backing paper and gray looked better). Once they were dry I simply mounted them to a piece of Amy Butler paper and then mounted that to some heavy cardstock for strength.
Voila. Cute. Modern, and one of those things that I'll keep forever.