DIY: Easy Silhouette Christmas Ornaments.

If you've been reading my blog for a few years then you may recall that every year I do a homemade ornament with the boys for our tree and one for each of the grandparents. I also host a once a month Mom's Craft Day for friends (more on that in a later post). This past month I combined the 2 and taught everyone how to make silhouette ornaments of their kids.

There are many ways to create silhouettes but this is the method I have used for probably the past 8 years and it always works! You can always pay to have silhouettes done (we get one of each of the boys on their first trip to Disney as it was a tradition with me growing up as well), but they really aren't that hard to do.

Step 1:

Take a side picture of your child, or dog, or whatever it is you want a silhouette of.

Step 2:

I've done this on the computer each time but this time I decided to use my phone as that is where my picture was and it happened to be the exact size I needed it to be. Place a piece of paper over the picture and lightly trace the outline of your subject with a pencil. It's up to you how much detail you want to capture as you outline.

HINT: be sure to only touch the rim of your phone with your hand as it will make the picture move or disappear if you touch the screen as you're doing it.

Step 3:

Cut out your outline. The small the scissors the better.

Step 4:

Choose what color you want your silhouette to be. With this one I chose to do the traditional black. Place your cut out onto the paper.

HINT: make sure to have it facing the opposite way you want the final product to face.

Step 5:

Trace the outline onto the paper.

Step 6:

Begin cutting out your silhouette. For hair detail cut like I did here, Then go back and cut out the bangs rather than trying to cut it out all at once. This way prevents tears as your try to maneuver the scissors and is so much easier.

Step 7:

Your final product should look just like the picture you took to begin with.

Step 8:

You can place these silhouette's on pretty much any surface. For the grandparent ornaments, I found a paper mache cube and decided to put a silhouette of each of the boys on each side. Before I put the silhouette on, I wanted to cover the sides and chose this gold sticky paper. I think I found it at JoAnn's and it comes in a bunch of different colors.

Step 9:

If you're covering a surface first, trace the outline of your ornament on the back of the paper so you know how big it needs to be.

Step 10:

Peel or glue the background paper.

Step 11:

And place it on the ornament. You can trim any over hang.

Step 12:

Put decoupage on the back side of your silhouette.

Step 13:

And place it onto the ornament.

Step 14:

Once it's dried, go over the entire side/ornament with decoupage to seal it.

Here are a few different variations I did. The red ones are painted instead of using paper for the background color. The red and black one, I added some crystal clear paint to it so there was some sparkle to it and not so flat since the others had some gold sparkle on them.

Here are some other options you could use that these silhouettes would look good on... A friend of mine did her silhouettes on the gold paper and then placed them on the black ornaments and they turned out beautiful!

Here are the ones I made for our tree. They are on a glossy porcelain ornament and in case you're wondering if it keeps the glossy factor after decoupaging, it does!

Way easier than you'd think right?!?

How fun would it be to create a silhouette of your kids each year and one day have a silhouette tree?? That's my goal one year! Remember to write the year it was created on the back, and who it is in case you forget in the years to come... or if 2 of yours look almost identical like mine!

Happy crafting!

Meg


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