Old-Fashioned Silhouettes

This year, I have decided that a majority of my Christmas presents will be handmade... so about a month ago, I asked my mom if there was anything I could make her for Christmas that she would particularly like. She told me that she'd like to have a couple of old-fashioned looking silhouettes to hang on her wall, so I set about thinking of what I could do. This is what I came up with...

The frames come 6 in a pack and are from Dollar Tree. They are made of foam, designed, I think, to be place card holders at showers. I used acrylic paint and a foam brush to paint them black.

For the silhouettes themselves, I used a book of clipart by Dover. Their books come with CDs that contain all the images. You could also find clipart online, though, or you could make your own.

I re-sized each image to be about 500 pixels wide, and printed at 300 dpi. I wanted the paper to be a bit special, but I must have gotten rid of my parchment paper in the move, so I printed on watercolor paper. As you may guess, this did not work out that well... given the bumpy texture of watercolor paper, I didn't get a consistent image. So, I went back in with a calligraphy pen and india ink and colored in each silhouette by hand.

I found the easiest way to get these in the frames was to detach at least two sides of the backing, then to slide each print in and glue the back on.

I then wanted to make them into two sets of three, so I used some ribbon scraps I had to make little hangers for each set. Basically, this is two strips of ribbon, layered together and glued to the back of all three pictures. I used the leftover tails of ribbon at the bottom, looping the ribbon back on itself to make a ruffley sort of effect, so it would look more decorative.

The backs of the pictures were looking pretty rough after this, so I then covered them in black felt, so they'd look a bit more finished. Given that I had everything but the frames on hand, this project cost me a whopping buck, and I know my mom will really love it!