Valentine Collage

For this project (originally featured on the Silhouette Blog 1/17/2014) I used the Silhouette advent calendar to make a Valentine-themed piece of home decor. It’s a Valentine collage!

With Christmas over, I was sad to put away my advent calendar.  So I didn’t. 😉 I just turned it into Valentine’s Day home décor instead.

I love a project like this, because I can use such a variety of designs, techniques, and materials.  I used a few shapes that have been in my Silhouette Library for ages, and picked up some great new ones.  For shapes, I typed in “heart” and “love” in the search box of my own Silhouette Library to find many of the files I used, and then I used the search feature in the Silhouette Design Store to find a few more.  You may see a couple weekly free shapes in there if you’ve been Silhouette-ing as long as I have. 🙂

I started with this fun Love You Blocks design and filled in around it.  The paisley heart in the lower right corner was just an excuse to have my CAMEO do its thing and cut out a lovely, intricate shape.

And I’ve got to show you an exciting new Silhouette product just released at CHA (winter 2014).  Adhesive corrugated paper!  The package comes with both kraft and white colors.  Boy, do I love it!  I used it below for extra texture behind my envelope shape (which uses “mint” adhesive cardstock) and on the roof of this cute little birdhouse.  The bird uses Silhouette glitter and double-sided adhesive.  The leaves on the branch are cut from “key lime” adhesive cardstock.

I had so much fun playing with all of these designs and materials.  Paper-pieced designs like these owls are so easy with Silhouette adhesive cardstock, but you can also do all the coloring and combining in the Studio software to turn something like this kite file into a print & cut, which I printed onto Silhouette printable cotton canvas.  And yes, the double-sided adhesive sticks great to the printable cotton canvas to add the pop of pink glitter on an otherwise-muted design.

I encourage all of you who have this Silhouette advent calendar kit to try using it for another season this year.  And there’s no time like the present!  Let’s see what you can come up with.

Here are a few more detail shots, just because there’s so much going on here that I want to share:

Silhouette Shapes:

Love You Blocks
Birdhouse
Heart Owls
Love Block Letter Title
Love You This Much
Paisley Heart
Kite
House of 3: Funky Valentine
Envelope Accent (from the Advent kit files)
Pocket Envelope