If you ask my husband, he will tell you that his favorite holiday is St. Patrick’s Day. With the below-average temperatures that we have been experiencing lately, we will likely stay close to home this St. Patrick’s Day weekend. So I’m pulling together some Irish-inspired decor to make things a little more festive around here. I mean, you can’t just let a favorite holiday go by without decorations can you?
I adore Eclectically Vintage’s bunny silhouette, and it inspired me make my own St. Patrick’s Day artwork. To begin, I pulled out some frames that I bought at a yard sale a couple of summers ago for a quarter a piece.
Isn’t it funny what you sometimes fine when you pull apart old ‘artwork’ from a thrift store or yard sale? These fruit prints were actually from a 1991 calendar. I know that I will probably never use them and should throw them away, but I will probably add them to my craft horde for future project opportunities. Just in case.
To make the actual silhouette, I found a free image that I liked online. I played around with it a little in my Paint program to attach the head from the online image to some shoulders. I like shoulders. Then I printed the image on my home printer and cut it out to use as my template. This is the black-ish image above.
I traced around the template onto some green card stock. Then I cut out the image with ordinary scissors. To cleanly cut out the silhouette, I made sure to keep the traced outline on the outside of my scissors. You can see some of the leftover outlines on the card stock above. After I finished cutting out the entire image, I cleaned up any rough edges with my scissors. See, no fancy machine needed.
I used double-sided tape to attach a piece of scrapbook paper to the back of the mat in the yard sale frame. Then I flipped the matted paper face-side up and centered the silhouette image. Marking where the image would be placed, I removed the image and turned it over, so that I could put more double-sided tape on the back. My secret for getting the double-sided tape right to the edge, so that the silhouette lies completely flat? I put the tape on the image, so that it hangs over the edge of the silhouette. When the silhouette is well covered with the tape, I trim the excess tape from the it with my scissors. I taped the silhouette to the matted scrapbook paper, and placed the mat and backer into the frame.
The frame is a little chippy around the edges, and I love it! To celebrate, I poured a couple of coffees. And maybe I did Irish it up a little with some whiskey. Who says you can’t start celebrating St. Patrick’s Day a little early?
It’s 5 o’clock somewhere – enjoy that Irish coffee! I love silhouettes – your little leprechaun is so cute! Great thrift find frames too!
Kelly
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