Unless maybe Jo can avoid reading this post, she’s going to end up getting an early surprise today. See, I’ve been working with her daughters, Little Jo and Mini Me, on a Mother’s Day gift for her. I’d love to be able to save it for Sunday, but I want you guys to have time to do the project yourself for Mother’s Day gifts, so I’ve got to post about it today. Surprise, Jo!

I was inspired by my recent work with my new Silhouette SD electronic cutter. I thought it would be awfully fun to make silhouettes with a Silhouette! The first step was to take a picture of the girls. Then I used the same custom diecut technique I’ve told you about before to transform the photo into a pattern that the machine could cut out for me. Gosh, I love this software!

You can see that I took a little bit of artistic license when creating the cut design, in particular with Mini Me’s leg. It looks really cute bent like that in the photo, but when reduced to an outline, it looked funky, so I drew in a straight leg for her. If these girls happen to look like yours, here’s my .studio file of the girls’ outline for you to download and use on your Silhouette if you like. (If you don’t have a Silhouette, you can always blow up your photo really large and then cut it out and use it as a pattern to trace.)

Rather than cut this design onto paper, I thought I’d have some extra fun and cut it onto fabric! To do this, I needed some Silhouette “clean cut” heat transfer fabric interfacing. All I had to do was cut the interfacing to size and quickly iron it onto the fabric.

Then I just peeled away the liner, revealing a plastic-like film on the back of the fabric, which made it easy to use in the Silhouette. Note that the “clean-cut” interfacing is not for use in a sewing machine. If you want to sew with the fabric, then use the “sewable” variety instead.

Once the machine had done its work and the piece was cut, I carefully peeled it off the cutting mat. I used scissors to trim little bits here and there. Isn’t that just so cute?

Next I picked two fun colors of fabric for the background of the image, to represent the sky and ground. I know Jo likes modern color schemes, so I picked an orange for the ground instead of a green. These colors will match the decor in her sitting room perfectly. I cut a big piece of the blue for the sky and a smaller piece of the orange for the ground. I put a strip of the fusible webbing under the edge of the orange in order to bond it in place.

Following package directions, I ironed the orange fabric down and then ironed the girls on top of that.

And that was it! I now have a lovely fabric piece that’s ready to frame. I know Jo is going to flip out when she sees it.

By the way, if you want to see how I ended up framing this art, check out our custom canvas art tutorial!