This time of year it’s hard not to complain about the weather. I know it won’t make any difference, and I try to keep my cold-weather burnout to myself, but it’s hard. Spoiler Alert: I fail all the time and grouse just like everyone else at work.
But I do have an advantage – as a crafter, I can literally make my own sunshine. Or flowers 🙂
This Spring Door Decoration has a couple of parts, but it’s super doable if you break it down into steps.
The Watering Can
First off, you need a watering can outline. I used clip art – when I googled around, I kept an eye out for a strong silhouette without too many tiny details, because this gets cut out of corrugated cardboard.
Enlarge the outline to the size desired, and print it on plain paper. Tape the paper to the cardboard, and then using an X-acto knife on a protected surface, slightly cut through the paper and the cardboard.
It is impossible, and very unsafe, to try to cut cleanly through the cardboard in one pass. It’s important to go slow and do several rounds, cutting deeper each time. If you start to get impatient, visualize how weird it’s going to be in the emergency room explaining to the doctor while you get your stitches that you were cutting out a cardboard watering can 🙂
Once that is cut, set it aside.
Flowers & Leaves
Adobe Illustrator is my drawing program of choice, so that is where I set up my flowers. Again, the goal is big shapes without a lot of detail, so in my case, I used several oval shapes that I overlapped and used the Pathfinder Palette > Unite to create the flower shape. I drew a leaf shape by creating an oval and then converting the top point from a curve to a point.
I went ahead and created a composite layout drawing in Illustrator so I could see the size and approximate color of the assembled piece. That let me play around with the number and sizes of the flowers and leaves I’d need.
TRY THIS EASY CRAFT TO BRING MORE FLOWERS INTO YOUR HOME FOR SPRING
Silhouette Studio would also be a good program to draw these flower shapes in; I just am more used to Illustrator so I usually start there. Also, if you don’t wish to draw your own leaves and flowers, there are tons of good cut files to choose from.
Because the base version of Silhouette Studio doesn’t support Illustrator files I exported my flower shapes as a DXF file.
I cut the flowers from several bright colors of smooth, 65# cover weight colored stock. To make them more dimensional, I cut two of each size so I could stack them and curl them when I glued them together, and I added a round circle to fit the center of each that could also be dressed up at the end. I wrapped the petals around a pencil to create the curl, and I used scissors to cut slits in the circle center piece so that could be folded and twisted. I curled the leaves around the pencil as well.
Assemble the flowers by gluing the curled petal piece to the flat piece, and then add on the center piece. I used quick drying tacky glue for this part of the assembly. Leave the leaves off so they can be used as filler when the flowers are added to the watering can.
Use hot glue to glue the flowers to the watering can cardboard cutout. I recommend test fitting the flowers a few different ways before starting to glue – my composite illustration rarely ends up matching my final layout. Hot glue in the leaves as needed to fill in any blank spot.
The Sentiment
I’ve been working on my brush lettering skills since December, so I wrote “happy spring” about a million times until I had one I was happy with. I did this on my iPad, so I was able to export that as a PNG file and trace it in Silhouette Studio. Of course, brush lettering skills are not required for this craft. You could use a typeface you like from your computer, or download a cut file that has the sentiment you’d like to add.
I cut my words out of bright green adhesive vinyl. After I used my hook tool to remove the excess vinyl (that process is called weeding), transfer tape is needed to lift the letters off the backer carrier of the adhesive vinyl. The scraper tool is great for rubbing the letters onto the cardboard surface. Carefully test the adhesion by pulling up slowly at one corner – if the letters stick down, keep pulling. If they stay with the transfer tape, rub them down some more.
After everything was complete, I threaded some twine through the corrugated parts of the cardboard to create a loop for hanging.
Pin this so you can find it later and make your own!
This project will be linked up at these great link up locations.
