{crafty} Christmas Subway Art

I am not a big holiday decorator. I can pin images all day long of mantel displays, wreaths for the front door, vignettes, you name it, but they rarely make their way in to my home. Don't get me wrong; I think they are gorgeous and am in awe of the decorating ability of others. I, however, am incredibly indecisive when it comes to decorating my own home. And when I do make a decision on what I want I tend to want to DIY and it ends up added to a long list of other projects to eventually be done at some future point in time yet to be determined.

Christmas is a little different. I love everything about Christmas and do enjoy breaking out the decorations the day after Thanksgiving and having a little fun with it. I decided I wanted to make a Christmas countdown this year and took to my Silhouette Cameo to see what I could do. I have enjoyed doing a little subway art lately so I created a 12x24 Christmas subway art file and cut it in vinyl using standard Christmas colors and chalkboard vinyl for the ornament. Since I would want to re-use this every year I had a sheet of 1/4" MDF cut down in to 12x24 sections and painted them white. I applied the vinyl over the top, stapled on some ribbon and now it is ready to hang and count down the big day!

I was so excited about this project that I decided to make several for my Etsy shop as well!

{crafty} Warning: Vinyl can be addicting

I have been wanting to try cutting vinyl on my Cricut for quite some time now but never wanted to pay the $10 for Cricut vinyl. A friend of mine told me about a site called CraftVinyl.com and I'm so glad she did! I ended up purchasing a grab bag of 25 12x12 sheets, which is cut from the same vinyl Cricut uses, for $25 including shipping. If I had bought the same amount in the Cricut branded vinyl I would have spent $60 and only gotten 4 colors.

As soon as I got my vinyl I knew immediately what I wanted to do; my laptop needed a makeover!

I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to put on it, but I grabbed my Gypsy and ended up looking at the Cindy Loo cartridge. I loved "tree1" but thought it was a little bare, so I started adding more branches and leaves to it and grouped & welded everything together. I sized it at 12x11 (lots of negative surrounding space) and cut it out in paper first to see how it fit on my laptop. Then I decided I needed some birds to go along with it. I cut the bird, also from Cindy Loo, at 1" 1.3" 1.5" and 2" and again cut them on paper to see how everything worked together before cutting the vinyl.

I chose this gorgeous blue color and cut away! I set my blade depth to 5 and pressure to 4 and it cut perfectly. I cut down 5 separate pieces of transfer paper so I could line up each individual image exactly where I wanted it.

You could easily do separate layers in different colors as well, but for this purpose I really like the all one color look.

Now, as soon as my husband saw this he told me the birds look like fish. Of course, now thats all I can see when I look at it! I suppose it could be an underwater tree ;-)


Now I have many other ideas for vinyl! Hopefully I will have more new projects to share soon.