Christmas Ornaments

My oldest daughter and her group of friends dubbed themselves The Anderson Family while in high school.  They have long since graduated and went about the world serving LDS missions, going to college, graduating, getting jobs, getting married and starting families - not necessarily in that order nor have they all done all of those things.  Through these years they have stayed in touch and every Christmas they have a family party in which my daughter and the "Mom" of the family give each member a lovely homemade gift with The Anderson Family logo on them.  This year they wanted to create a Christmas tree ornament.  

I suggested that we start with a ready made ornament and add some vinyl using my Silhouette Portrait electronic cutter.  I bought vinyl when I bought the machine but have been scared to try it.  I'm really sorry I haven't tried it sooner.  

IT WAS SO EASY!

I started with their family logo:

Set it up in the software for the Silhouette and added the year.

The vinyl goes in to the machine without the mat.  

I used the pre-set numbers for vinyl 

but slowed the speed down to 3 

because we were cutting some pretty small pieces.  

There was no need to cut the vinyl off the roll before inserting.  Just stick the end in and let the machine cut away.  We trimmed the cut pieces off the roll when it was done cutting and then cut out each individual unit of words.  We found it was easiest to pick out the centers of letters BEFORE gently pulling off the background vinyl.

Once the background vinyl is removed, lay a piece of transfer paper over the top (it's like a giant roll of masking tape - reminds me of the tap rolls we have to remove all the pet hair from our clothes).  The letters then stick to the transfer paper so that you can remove the lettering from the paper the vinyl words were on.  Lay the transfer paper over the top of your ornament and rub the letters down onto the ornament.  They stick easily and are easy to lift up and rearrange if you accidentally mess anything up.

(sorry no photo of that part - I was too busy doing it!)

We REALLY liked how the ornaments turned out and everyone was very impressed.

I have all kinds of things flying through my head that I want to put vinyl on now!

I'm really sorry I didn't buy more colors when it was all on sale recently.

My daughter decided to hang on to the remaining pieces of vinyl.

If the year is cut off it can be used as a stencil to create next years gift!  

They just haven't figured out what to stencil on yet. . .

. . . any suggestions?