Glass Etched Ornament

Here's a nice wedding or Christmas gift that isn't too difficult or expensive.  Made it with my Silhouette Cameo.  Don't worry, I will be doing things that don't require the Silhouette soon.  Just needed to use my new toy for gifts!  ;)  It's a beveled glass ornament etched with the Sacramento Mormon Temple, names, and the year the couple got married.  You could do the same thing with any temple, church or building.  You could even find some other kind of graphic or just use text.

Start out with a photograph of the image that you want to use.  I found a lovely image of the Sacramento Temple on ldschurchtemples.com.  I won't post it on here since I do not own the photo, but the website has tons of photos of every LDS temple.

I brought the photo into Photoshop Elements and played around with the high pass filters and threshold until I had a nice, high contrast, black and white image.  I inverted the colors so that the main image of the temple would be black.  I used the black brush tool (a lot) to fill in a lot of the details since the stencil was going to be so small.  It's going to be SMALL, so don't worry about perfection.  Then I used the cutout filter to simplify the image even further.  I ended up with the image below.  There are some nice youtube videos that can show you how to do this better than I can.

Now you want to open up your image in Silhouette Studio.  Use the trace feature with the "high pass" on the greatest setting and the "low pass" on the lowest setting.

Push trace and delete your image.  You should be left with this. 

Clean up your outline by deleting and adjusting some of the points and make it the right size for your ornament.  Add some text (make sure to fuse it together if it's a cursive font) and you are ready to cut your vinyl.

This is how it should look all cut out, transferred, and ready for the etching cream.  I bought my ornament from etchworld.com here and used the same Armour Etch cream that I used to make the mugs that I did before.

I can't tell you how hard this thing was to get photos of, but it turned out really nice.  Like the reflection of my fingers and camera in the ornament? :)

Hope everyone had a great Christmas!

Cutesycrafts is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.



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Fun With Glass Etching

Here's a nice little white elephant gift or something neat for that friend of yours that has a fun sense of  humor. Looks like a regular mug, you finish your drink and....

...WHAT?!?!

Haha.  I couldn't resist!  I found these cute glass mugs at Target for a couple dollars, used my Silhouette to cut out some vinyl lettering (make sure to use the mirror function to reverse the letters) and used some Armour Etch to permanently etch the bottom of the glass.  You will also need some transfer tape to transfer the vinyl onto the glass to keep all of the little letters in place.  I just bought the Cricut brand of vinyl and tape because that's what my local store had.  It worked great!  Now I want to etch everything!!! :)

One more thing, you can still get 20% off at Lifestyle Crafts using promo code CUTESYCRAFTS at checkout.  Great place to get die cutting machines and supplies!

Cutesycrafts is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.



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Glitter Christmas Art

I got an early Christmas present... a Silhouette Cameo!!!  I got it mostly to help me out with cutting things for my Etsy shop, but I'm having a lot of fun finding out what else it can do.  I absolutely LOVE that I can cut any shape that I can think up!  If you are still looking for a really nice gift for the crafter in your life, this is perfect!  They have some great bundles for sale here on Amazon.  The bundle I bought came with some double sided adhesive and glitter that I didn't really know what to do with until I saw this post on the Silhouette Blog.  I love the detail of the little red nose!

Then it was decided by my friend Savanna that Rudolph needed a girlfriend.  Such a cute idea!  Savanna is so creative. Check out her Etsy shop here.

Here they are together.  Super cutesy! 

Then I couldn't get this idea (or song) out of my head, so I made a "Baby It's Cold Outside" one too.  Super easy since the Silhouette can cut out any font on my computer!  I used the same double sided adhesive that I did for the reindeer.  Love the white and blue glitter!

If you don't have a Silhouette, you could probably just cut out the adhesive paper with an x-acto knife or even scissors.  It would just take a bit longer.

Cutesycrafts is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. 




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Felt

If you haven't noticed, I have a lot of felt projects on my blog.  I really love felt.  So far, I've just been using acrylic felt from the craft store because it's cheap, and honestly I didn't know very much about the other options.  It's fine to use for things like advent calendars that will only be touched once a year.  For toys or things that are going to be shoved into the bottom of a dress up bin, I wanted to find a better option.  Everything I've made is still holding up just fine, but I hate the way that the felt pills or fuzzes when it's handled a lot.

I got several different samples of felt to play around with so I could decide what kind I liked the most.  I tried out a 100% wool, a wool/rayon blend, a polyester "eco" felt made from recycled plastic, and just the craft store acrylic (also made from plastic) to compare.  I took each of my felt samples, embroidered on them, cut them, pulled them, rubbed them, and crumpled them. And no, I was not being very scientific when I did my "tests".

You can't really see much with my horrible photography skills.  In the end, all of them pilled (fuzzed).  Surprisingly the wool/rayon blend seemed to pill the least.  The acrylic, as expected, pilled the most.  When I tested their strength by cutting off strips and pulling, the 100% wool performed the best, the acrylic was the worst, the polyester and the wool/rayon blend were about the same in the middle.

I wanted to take into account not only the durability, but also the cost of the felt.  Although 100% wool is very nice and supposed to be the best, it's super expensive.  Not really worth the cost since the other options seemed fine to me.  Just my opinion of course.  The polyester felt is definitely a lot nicer than the acrylic, and I do like that it's made from recycled plastic.  The price is really great too...in the end, however, I decided that I like the wool/rayon blend made by National Nonwovens the best.  There's something about the wool felt that gives it a warm, not shiny, feeling.  I also really love that it is manufactured right here in the USA.  I like that I'm supporting a US based company.  It's reasonably priced, and they have some really beautiful colors to choose from.  The deciding factor for me was the way the fabric pilled the least when I handled it a lot.  I've been using it to make birthday crowns for my etsy shop, and I love it!

I wrote this post, not because I want to advertise a product to you, but because I really want you to know that there are other options out there besides the craft store.  I did, however, become a Joggles.com affiliate because they sell National Nonwovens' felt at a great price. Just type "National Nonwovens" into their search bar and look for the 20/80 or the 35/65 blends.  If you click any of  my links to their store and buy something, I get a small commission.  I became an affiliate AFTER falling in love with this felt.  I'm giving you my honest opinion about the felt product that they sell, if you click my links and buy, that's just a little extra bonus for me.  To see all of the colors laid out, I recommend going to the manufacturer's website here.  I am not currently affiliated with National Nonwovens.  I really LOVE this product, and I will be using it for a lot (if not all) of my felt crafts from here on out.  Hope this helps someone out there!

Other options for buying:
-Joann's usually has a VERY limited selection of colors of this brand (mostly earth tones).
-Go straight to the manufacturer's website to buy large quantities at wholesale prices.
-I shop at Prairie Point Junction if I don't want to buy whole yards.
-And of course Joggles has really great prices and usually a coupon code.  You have to buy whole yards with them though.



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