life on swann street: Kid Silhouettes

Between my two oldest sisters, I have seven nieces and nephews: Claire, Emma, Luci, Joe Joe, Matthew, Becket and Helen (in age order).

For Christmas this year, I decided to make their silhouettes as the Christmas gifts for Margot and Dan, and Mari. After scouring the internets/blog-o-sphere for inspiration, I realized most people use their Silhouette machine or Photoshop, which I don't have, so I just went about it the old fashioned way. I found this blog's tutorial the most helpful.

A few months back, I asked the parents to send me profile shots of their children. Mari sent them back first and they were exactly what I was looking for. So I sent those examples to Margot and Dan, and they sent me back great images too. I didn't tell them what I needed them for, but they may have picked up on what I was doing (although I never did ask them that either).

Here are the original photos.

I printed them out as 5x7 photos regular white paper and regular computer paper. Once printed, I traced the image, adding some extra detail like collars, bows, etc., as the aforementioned blog had done, and the result was great. Truly, it is these little details that make so much of a difference.

I wanted them all to be a similar size (which they were not), so after cutting them out, I photocopied several and recut them, until they were nearly the same overall size (you'll see in the end result that they don't necessarily look to be the same size, as their widths are different, etc., but overall, they are).

Below you can see the traced image and the added back collar.

Here are all seven cut out, but before they were resized. See how Matthew's is much larger than his brother, Joe Joe's?

The Martinez Kids

This one shows the major differences in the rounded bottom part of the image. In the end, I ended up like the way Becket's looked best (third one down the line -- and the only boy), so I used his as a template and adjusted the bottoms.

The Geary Kids

Then I headed on over to Paper Source in Georgetown. This store is so adorable, I could have spent hours in there. My original plan was to use different paper as matting for each little one, but once I found this multi-colored, mini-chevron paper, I knew I would use it for all of them. It was muted, but colorful, playful, yet not over the top, and would work super well for both girls and boys. I also picked up black cardstock to use for the actual silhouette.

Then...I got a little sidetracked. With only a few days until Christmas, I headed over to Mami and Pops' house in Oakton to prepare the house for Christmas morning. We put on our aprons (Mami's was a gift from Margot; mine was a Marshalls find too good to pass up) and got to work.

Mami and I set the tables, including the Becket and Helen's table...

And we baked like crazy people -- four coffee cakes and a batch of pecan balls. Don't even ask how much butter, sugar and flour that is. But it was so delicious.

Then we headed out to grab the finishing touches for gifts or cooking that we needed, including seven frames from Michaels for the silhouettes.

After gathering all my supplies, it was go time. I carefully cut out each image onto the black cardstock. This wasn't "difficult," but it was stressful. I wanted to be sure to capture every little detail, so it felt like I didn't breathe while I was cutting them out. After each one I would take a big sigh of relief that I didn't totally mess up the entire project, and get to work on the next one.

Then, using the paper cutter I had bought for the Christmas cards, I cut the background paper to fit the frames from Michaels (I used the matting, adjusted slightly, that came with the frames as my template).

While I'm doing all this, Mami was chopping stuff for the Kidney Stew and Pops decided to make us some Manhattans.

After cutting out all of the silhouettes and sizing the background paper, it was about 10 p.m., so Mami, Pops and I decided it would be a good time to eat some dinner (a little late for dinner, but hey, we're Cuban). I called it a night and we ate while watching Muppet Family Christmas, and eating some delicious baked cod with tomato, capers and onion and some tasty quinoa and broccoli. We had an early Christmas Eve morning ahead of us.

I woke up and after some morning joe, immediate got to work finishing the silhouettes. After some discussion, we decided they should all be facing left, despite the photos originally having them facing right. I used an Elmer's mounting glue stick to attach the cut out black cardstock images to the mini-chevron stripe background pages and placed them in the frames.

Here they are, in age order again.