Watching Over the Ways: Silhouettes

Lately it seems that all I have shared are ideas for cleaning and/or organizing. I clean our house, and I do enjoy organizing, but this. This is my thing. Random little cheap crafts are my thing. At least, this is what I enjoy doing.

My mom found this silhouette paper somewhere and got it for me because she knows I like this sort of thing. Plus she's sweet!

It looks blue, but that's just the cover sheet. The pages are black on one side and white on the other. I'm sure you can get something like this at any craft store. Here it is on Amazon.

Really, though, black card stock paper would work just fine.

Step One:

Take profile photos of whatever you want. I chose my three little ones. And I took these pictures with my iPhone.

Step Two:

I loaded the photos to my shutterfly account through the app on my phone.

Step Three:

Then I logged onto shutterfly from our laptop. I rotated the photos sideways so they would be larger and zoomed in as much as I could and still see everything I wanted included.

Step Four:

I put a sheet of computer paper up onto the screen and traced the borders of the photo with a pencil. I did this on three separate papers, one for each child.

Step Five:

I carefully cut out each one where I had traced around the faces.

Step Six:

I taped the white paper to the silhouette paper.

At first, I taped it to the black side {wrong!}, so don't do that! I took off the white paper profile I had cut out and then taped it to the back side of the silhouette paper. I made sure to pay attention to which way I wanted the faces to be pointing.

Step Seven:

Cut out the profile again, this time including the black paper that you taped it to.

A little bit of the white paper showed over the edges, so I just trimmed those off so they weren't visible from the front.

Step Eight:

I already had these three frames, so I just taped them down on a white sheet of paper. You could add these to any frame of your choice, but there are all sorts of fun things to do with a silhouette picture. I included links to some ideas at the bottom.