These are the two ladies that got me thinking, Living with Lindsay's post found here. As well as Homemade By Jill's post here.
Silhouettes!, perfect for my Mom's decor and it would match with previous presents I have given my in-laws. Now what kind of silhouette to do. I toyed with the idea of a pillow and then decided on a paper cut out framed. Out I went to look for the supplies.
1. Paper from Micheals no problem
2. Subjects to silhouette easy... I have children!
3. The frame... this is where i got stumped.
Why? Being the difficult person I am; I decided I wanted to use an oval frame. Do you know how hard it is to find an oval frame?? I sure didn't think it was going to be such a problem. Of course I didn't want just one, I wanted six!
Then by accident I found them. In their original state they were ugly really ugly! Gold and silver plastic frames with what I thought was a plastic mirror in them, but they had potential besides they were a $1. Once home I got straight to work dismantling them and found to my surprise that they were real mirrors.
When I had wanted to do a paper silhouette I thought that I could live without the glass front as they weren't really frames and I was having so many problems finding them. Now I had a better idea! Flashback to Living with Lindsay's etched silhouette on the mirror. Ping! that was it I knew what I was going to do.
Okay so I had no idea how pleased I would be with this or that I might want to post this so, I did not take step by step pictures.
Here's what I did: After
taking apart the frames I painted them black with acrylic paint as a base coat. Took a picture of my children and followed the basic principles described in the above links. Then after cutting out the stencil I thoroughly cleaned the mirrors and applied spray on adhesive to the back of my stencil. I placed the stencil on the mirror making sure to firmly press on all the edges of the stencil to prevent bleeding. Here's where trial and error began, trying to stencil in the usual manner provided less than spectacular results and chipping. So do not bother trying to use an acrylic based paint or any other sponge or paint brush method. What you need is spray paint. Rust-oleum Universal advanced formula to be exact. I chose the satin finish. So holding the can directly above and parallel to the mirror I started spraying. One good solid coat is all you need. I very carefully and immediately removed the stencil and was delighted with the results. One quick coat of the same spray paint over top of the base coated frames and I was done. The hardest part was waiting till they dried to see it all together. I must say, I am pleased with my results. It's amazing what you can do with some dollar store framed mirrors, a can of spray paint and time. Christmas Crafting almost done.
