It should have the word 'Pinterest' in it because I SWEAR all my ideas are totally copied or adapted from there. I'm completely addicted - in a good way...I think. Anyway, I've kept this pin in the back of my head for a long time. A major impression, indeed. It involved using wood-grain Contact paper on things to spruce them up. (Get it? Spruce! Wood-Grain!) In particular, I had my eye on this candle: If you look closely enough at my final shots of this new project I'm writing about, you'll even see my version of THIS very candle! Anyway, I digress.
Anyone who knows me knows I am extraordinarily picky about things that go in the house, and often I get something built up in my mind that SHOULD be easy to find but isn't. So, what's a semi-crafty girl to do? Make it herself, of course!! So when I repainted our dining room, of course that set into motion lots of other decorating changes in there that I didn't anticipate, including replacing the plates that I had hanging on the wall around the big mirror. As an aside, the paint color change didn't actually necessitate this plate re-do, the fact that one of the plates fell off the wall and broke and isn't for sale anymore was the real culprit. But who doesn't love a good excuse to change things like that?! It should be easy to find some pretty plates to hang up in a sort-of neutral gray dining room, right? Yeah, I thought so TOO, but it isn't. I bought some at Pier 1 - these:
I was worried they were too orange-y red, and I was right. It was going to look like Christmas all year long in the dining room if I kept them...but make your own plates? Are you crazy, girl? Well, yes, but aside from that, I was going to take a serious head start there, at Old Time Pottery with these cheap plain white plates: If you look closely enough, they were only TWO DOLLARS (insert "Better Off Dead" paperboy reference here.) So, gathering my Google image search results for the words 'bird', 'silhouette', 'clip art', and 'free', my dollar store wood-grain contact paper, and my handy-dandy xacto knife, I was off to make the plates that frankly should really exist already.
First, find your clip art. Make sure you use the word, 'silhouette' in your search so you don't have to weed out too many complicated images. You definitely want simple here. Copy them and paste them onto a Microsoft Word document, resize them so they're all the same scale, and print them out. Then I totally cheated and taped the image printout onto my contact paper and cut both layers out with my knife at the same time. It would have taken too long to cut the paper and THEN used my cutout as a template. By now I was super excited and, in addition to being picky, I'm also impatient, so I could NOT wait to see how these turned out.
Here's how the cutouts looked before the stickin' onto the plates:
And HERE'S how they look all hanging up! (See the candle at the bottom that started all of this?) I'm really happy with the result. They turned out better than I thought they would. Of course you can't eat off them, but that's okay. And I can change them to something else when birds on a branch start looking dated to me. Yay! What do you think? Be nice, please. I'm fragile, too.
