Teacher Appreciation Bulletin Board

I volunteered to decorate the bulletin board for my daughter’s elementary-school teacher for Teacher Appreciation Week. The school asked for a 50’s theme, so this is what I came up with after some helpful tips from my peeps on the Silhouette Plus forum. (Thanks, ladies!)

Of course I wanted to use my Silhouette Cameo, but those bulletin boards are huge!  It was about 78″ tall and 48″ wide.  The big rolls of school butcher paper available to me were 36″ wide.  Yes, I did cut all but the words and the blue layer of the jukebox from butcher paper using my Cameo and a 12″ mat.  I plugged in the page dimensions for the full space I needed to cover and based the size of my designs on that.  See?  (The little red square in the upper left corner is the 12″x12″ space I could cut on my mat.)

You can see in the end I was able to replicate my planned design pretty well.

The hardest part was the jukebox.  I couldn’t find one I liked available to purchase, so I looked online for images and ended up finding this as a black & white coloring page some artist had drawn.  I used the Trace function in Silhouette Studio, then separated all the pieces into layers by releasing the compound path.  Then I was able to color the pieces individually with this perky color scheme.

The design was the easy part.  On the pieces larger than I could fit on a 12″ mat, I cut the pieces in two parts and glued them back together.  (I sure could have used a 12×24″ Cameo mat in this case!)  I actually cut the jukebox in 6 pieces from spare 12″ cardstock, then glued those pieces together and used the whole thing to trace on one large piece of blue butcher paper as the solid background so it wouldn’t have seams.  Yes, folks, I traced with a pencil and cut with scissors!  (Shhh! Don’t tell my Cameo.)

I was able to cut it in 6 pieces by positioning the background jukebox layer on my mat, cutting as much as it would cut edge-to-edge, then repositioning it to cut the next section.  I started with the upper left section, then moved down and then over until all 6 major areas were cut.  I used the overlap/duplicate areas to match it up and tape it.  The blade just picks up where it meets the red boundary (I keep my Preferences on cut to edge of page) so it was cutting to the edge of my 12×12″ paper every time.

Most of the rest I cut in batches after cutting the 36″ wide butcher paper into 12×12″ squares.  I cut the butcher paper using my tried-and-true “printer paper” settings (speed 10, thickness 15, blade 1). Unfortunately, not all butcher papers are created equal and the pink did not cooperate very well.  It just wanted to tear.  In the end, I cut the words from some hot pink cardstock.  Several of the words had to be spliced together, as well. (The word “Greatest” is 21″ wide.)

I used spray adhesive to glue all the pieces together like the yellow labels on the black records and nearly all of the individual pieces of the jukebox.  I hadn’t used spray adhesive before, but it was perfect for this project.  I still think it’s too messy to be one of my go-to glues.

I added a little glitter glue to some of the yellow accent pieces, wrote all of the students’ names on the records with a white chalkboard marker, and spent way too much time putting it up at the school.  (Thanks for the help, Mom!)

Once again, my Cameo did everything I needed for this school-related project.  Even on a big scale.  Gotta love that Cameo!