My Favorite Of All Projects

That is a pretty bold statement. I have done my fair share of projects. I have a lot of ideas of things I want to do around the house. I have a lot of ideas of how to change things. I have a lot of ideas for new projects. But this is my favorite, hands down. But before I go into this project and why it's my favorite, let me give a little background.

One of my favorite rooms in the house is the family room. It's the room where we spend the most time. It also happens to have a huge mantel that runs wall to wall. I love it but I seem to be at a lost of what to do with it. I put some stuff up and that was that, but I was never pleased with how it looked. But at the same time I wasn't sure what would make it better, what I wanted to do with it. So I just left it.

Recently I decided I wanted to start making improvements to the mantel, so I started drawing up how I wanted it to look and looking for ideas online. One idea I found led me to doing this project:

But that's not my favorite project - although I really like it. This is my favorite project:

Awesome, right?! I know. I love this project. We have tons and tons of pictures around the house. I think we are all very pretty or perhaps I'm a little vain. Or maybe it's just that I enjoy looking at pictures and I feel like all the pictures makes it feel homey. But I wasn't sure putting another large picture up on the mantel was the right move. I wasn't sure what I wanted, so I search Pinterest and found a link to an Etsy shop where you send her a picture and she'll turn it into a silhouette. Then she'll send you a PDF and you can do whatever you wish with it. But of course you had to pay.

I liked the idea and I married a computer guy. So I figured I could save some money and do it on my own computer with some help from that computer guy I married. Why couldn't I? It didn't seem all that hard.

Step one became looking for the right picture. I knew I wanted to use a picture of Rob and Addison. Why not one of me and Addison? Or of all three of us? I don't know exactly. I just wanted one of the two of them - father and daughter. But I couldn't find the right picture. In order to do a project like this you really need a picture with very clear silhouettes and I just couldn't find one like that. Truthfully, I was feeling like this project just wasn't going to happen until it occurred to me that I could take a picture. Duh!

So I found an idea for a picture and the next day set it all up, which consisted of Rob taking Addie outside and me taking my camera then snapping some pictures while they did their thing. We took several pictures until I got the perfect picture.

Addison actually ended up looking blurry in the picture but because of the way I wanted to use this picture, her being blurry didn't matter. So after taking the picture, I excitedly rushed inside to get it on my computer and start working on my project. I have this program on my computer, Gimp, that was free to download and pretty amazing. Rob originally put it on my computer to make rounding the corners of my pictures for this blog easier, but it has tons and tons of uses. Including drawing a silhouette.

I drew up around Rob and Addie the best I could and cut them out.

Now that the background was gone I could move it on my Silhouette program and use my fancy, awesome Silhouette cutter to cut it out on vinyl. All I had to do at this point was communicate between the program and the cutter, resize it, load in my black vinyl and cut it.

I ended up using two vinyl sheets since I wanted to have it be bigger and I couldn't fit the entire picture on one sheet. So then I had to make sure that I had it perfectly lined up so you couldn't see that it was two different vinyls once it was on the canvas. And that my friends was probably the hardest part. But I was successful and it turned out perfectly.

I had actually debated painting the canvas with the vinyl on it then peeling off the vinyl so the silhouette would end up being in white and the rest of the canvas another color. But I couldn't decide so I decided to just leave it black and white for the time being because I could always paint it later but I couldn't unpaint it. And I'm happy about my decision. I love the black and white. I love the simpleness of it.

Seriously this project is just awesome. I love it. Totally worth the time it took and even better it was a fairly cheap project all in all. Plus I love looking at that silhouette of my husband and daughter together. Now you understand why this is my favorite project of all time.