The Writing on the Wall

Well, I received a little early birthday present from Aaron this week.  Yes, I have a birthday coming up on Monday.  It's a big one and it involves a mid-decade mark.  If you are thinking 25, then you just go right on with that line of thinking.  Bless you.

Anyway, Aaron is one of those kind of husbands...if he finds out there is something I really want, no matter how frivolous, he finds a way to get it.  I had mentioned several hundred times that I would love, love, love to have a Silhouette cutting tool - primarily for its fabric-cutting abilities.  But, I knew that I could find lots of other things to do with it.  Well, what do you know...a box from Amazon landed on my front steps this week and a Silhouette was inside!!!  Happy Birthday to me!

I was so, so anxious to get it out and play with it.  Aaron was thoughtful enough to have ordered me a little starter kit as well. He knows me.  He knew it would just kill me to have that machine and nothing to do with it right out of the box.  So, I set to work studying up on it.

I had a little quote I ran across and bookmarked for use in something one day.  It said, "A perfectly kept house is the sign of a misspent life."  Truer words were never spoken!  How cute would that be on the wall of my laundry room - the site of all my piles and messes?  It would give me the chance to try running adhesive vinyl through the machine!

So, I spent several minutes hours scouring the web for the "perfect" font.  I finally found it and carefully laid my little quote out in the Silhouette program.

It was easy, easy.  The part that made me nervous was actually using the machine to cut something.  My machine came with silver vinyl, so I went with it and loaded it for cutting.

Okay, easy enough.  I nervously sent my designed quote to the machine.  (For those who care, I used the blue cap, no carrier, a speed of 8 and a thickness of 12 - per the Silhouette website.)  It began the cutest little humming and cutting process.  It kind of sounded like a bunch of little elves buzzing around in there with an razor blade.  Aaron and I both held our breath and watched as the vinyl began to come out the other side.  This is what the finished product looked like.  You can see the faint outline of the cut font.

I carefully peeled away the negative space.

It really worked!  I was amazed.  In order to transfer the quote to a wall, you need to use transfer paper.  So, I covered my quote in the sticky transfer paper.

Now, here is the tedious part.  We had to transfer to the wall.  This is the part where I tell you that there are two "kinds" of people in this world.  I am kind of an eye-baller when it comes to hanging stuff.  If it looks good to the naked eye, I figure no one will notice if it is not perfect.  My husband?  He broke out the level.

He started getting obsessed with getting it exactly, 100% level.  I reminded him that this was on the wall of our laundry room.  Who would see it anyway, but me?  It was also a very forgiving font with no exact baseline to each letter.  Let's just go with it.  We were very scientific and used this for smoothing out the bubbles in the vinyl.

Yes, that is a Pampered Chef gadget for scraping dried food off of their stoneware products.  We improvised.  It worked.

Peeling off the transfer paper was slow, steady work.

But, it was worth it.  Here's our finished product.

I am pretty pleased with it.  I still may frame it out or something.  It is a little lost on the wall and the silver doesn't stand out as well as I would like on my blue/green walls.  It's what we had and we worked with it.  But, it was really just a practice run anyway and it has given me tons of confidence to try other stuff on my new little gadget.  Besides, it makes me kind of chuckle when I read that on the wall of my laundry room.  Indeed, truer words were never spoken written!