Silhouettes.

every year for Christmas, my two dear friends (gretch and mols…from our small group of 9+ years…you’ll probably hear alot more about them and their crazy ingenious creativity!) and i have some kind of gift exchange. sometimes we draw names, sometimes it has to be a homemade gift, sometimes it has to be something from GoodWill…but this year, we decided to give each other a gift all together that we have been talking about doing for about a year now. so we planned a day and made silhouettes of our kids together! i wish i had brought my camera that day, as it would have been fun to capture the silly moments. but i didn’t, so a description will have to do!

here is how we did it:

we started with profile photographs of our kids. you can enlarge them to whatever size you would like, but our’s were fine in a 4×6.

i used a combination of both of the above pictures of Bella.

we took the photograph and held it up to the window (for backlighting…actually, it was a cloudy day, so we took turns standing on the outside of the window, shining a big flashlight onto the picture from the back. i’m sure molly’s neighbors were quite intrigued!) we covered the photograph with white paper, and traced the general outline of each child’s profile.

from there, we went to our local kinkos, made copies of our finished template, just to have a few on hand. after a brief stop at “The Grille” (for those of you who haven’t experienced Sierra Grille, it might just be worth a trip to the beach to do so…as long as you order the taco sauce and smother all of your food in it! maybe one day i’ll write a blog post just about how amazing that sauce is…especially coupled with some fresh fire roasted salsa…i might just have to stop writing and get a snack!)

moving on…once you have your template, you need to find a way to cut that exact, detailed profile from black cardstock. after many attempts, a few frustrated sighs, and some questioning from my kids as to why i was so angry (okay…so maybe it was worse than a sigh), i finally figured that the easiest option is to just lightly tape your white profile template onto the black paper, and use plain old scissors to cut through both pieces at once, following the template on the top, white paper. (if you can find a smaller pair of scissors, those worked well for me. but an exacto craft knife just ruined my paper. i would’ve saved myself lots of time and some money if i had just stuck with the easier option to begin with.) anyway, one tip for you when cutting…try to move the paper more than you move the scissors. might sound odd now, but it’ll make sense when you start.

once you have your profile cut from the black cardstock, you can assemble however you desire. i bought two oval frames in a BOGO sale at Joann’s, took out the mat, used some funky scrapbook paper from Michael’s, cut an oval from some solid blue paper to match my scrapbook paper ( i found a template for an oval by searching google images for “ovals” and printed it to the size i wanted, then cut it out of the blue paper the same as i did for the profile template.)

here’s the final product:

we hung them above the kids craft table in our hallway.

here are some closeups:

i added each child’s name and age at the bottom. wanna know about the scallop boarder? just ric rac! super easy!!

i can’t believe how well the profiles captured my kids. i also made them for each set of grandparents too! i think it turned out to be a very meaningful gift for them! gretchen and molly’s each turned out a little different too, so i’m gonna get some pics of their’s and post them later, so you can see different ways to do it. have fun!