Again, long time no post! Still cooking up ideas for the not the New Old House, but the holidays have pushed that aside for now. After all, we didn’t buy it so I have time.
What we did do, was buy a small vinyl cutter. Several years ago, we had a large professional one, along with a heat press that we used to make and sell t-shirts and the like. We’ve sold that since there just isn’t room at the Cottage for a 4’ long cutter. We picked up a little “hobby” cutter that allows us to cut our own designs. So of course we had to use it right away!
We made homemade raisin bread for friends that we dropped off on Saturday, but I wanted something different for my co-workers. So many of them are crafty and I have a small collection of adorable decorations from over the years. I wanted to return the favor with something we made. So…we made some neat wood slice ornaments.
The wood slices were easy. We walked out to the wood racks and selected what we refer to as a “little log” that had been seasoning for several years (little logs are 3-5” rounds, the limbs from trees that are a bit too small to split but too big to leave behind as junk). Mr Eclectic promptly cut it down with a chop saw into slices about ½-3/4” thick and drilled holes for stringing them. I found some snowflakes in our clipart collection (commercial use) and he cut them out on white vinyl.
He weeded the “junk” vinyl (the part that’s left after the design is cut out) and I placed them on the slices (using tweezers to peel them off of the backer). Then he cut out “Let It Snow” and weeded that while I strung them with twine. I placed the letters on the backs of about 3-4 slices before letting him finish, I loved the snowflakes but the letters frustrated me.
Here’s the result:
Cute huh? Now…what to do next year…hmm…
those are so cute. What a fabulous idea. We have a vinyl cutter to make signage for the office building my husband manages. I'll have to try this, maybe for halloween decorations! Any way, do you think you would be happier with the letter side if you hadded a snowflake to the wording side?
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Thanks! No, it was because rather than using transfer tape we placed each letter individually by hand (well, tweezer). We bought a little test vinyl from the craft store and the lettering used up the last of it! I think one snowflake above the "ow" in "snow", next to "let" would have been pretty though! We plan to buy some "regular" sign vinyl (probably duracal) soon, it's much less expensive compared to the craft store kind. That way we'll have plenty on hand for the next project. We didn't coat the slices with anything, I'm still not sure if we should have at least given them a coat of Mod Podge to (hopefully) keep them from cracking (if they weren't totally dry). We used a pretty seasoned piece of wood, but we've never done this before so there's really no way to know for sure.
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