Burlap Silhouettes

I'm so excited to learn that some of you ladies have a love for your children AND for burlap. In this project, I combined the two. I had these great frames on my wall with sorry, too small for the frame, old vacation pictures. The vacation was great, but the pictures didn't do much to add glamour to my walls. Being a mom of two toddlers with another on the way, I don't have a lot of time to think about home decor or upload my million pictures to winkflash to place an order during one of their great sales.

One evening, the idea came to me. Why not paint silhouettes of my sweet kiddos on scraps of burlap I had covering my sewing table to put in those frames?! This was such a quick and simple project, one I highly recommend to anyone who loves their children and burlap, classic and a little shabby.

Here's how I did it -
I found/took profile pictures of each of my children.
I opened them in an image editing program. In this case, I used Gimp.
I used the lasso tool and clicked around the profile I wanted to create the silhouette of. (Sorry, I'm not a professional graphic designer, so I don't know what the technical jargon is for clicking around the image using the lasso tool.)
I then created a new layer and flood filled the selected shape black. Then, I hid the original image/layer.
Saved new image and printed. (I actually imported the image into Word to get my proportions right, then printed.)
I cut out the pieces of burlap I'd need and taped my printed paper and burlap onto a cookie sheet. The great thing about burlap for this kind of project is that it's pretty transparent. I used a small paint brush to trace around the silhouette's outline, then used a larger brush to fill it in. For this project, I used a craft acrylic paint. Cheap. Could this project be any cheaper?!


After drying, I framed each silhouette and love the new look!