Celebrating new beginnings

One of the knitting girls is embarking on a new adventure. She, and her lovely family, have taken the plunge and are sea changing. They have bought, sold up and moved in what feels to me to be lightning speed. Once these guys make a decision, seems the best place to be is out of their way!

Such a new and exciting thing and I wanted to join in the celebration of their new home, but also celebrating their family as that's really what its all about.

 This is their family tree which is papercut using my Silhouette and I really love it.

I designed the image on the Silhouette software, starting with the names in Times New Roman, and literally built the tree around it. The tree is based on a clip art image of a tree which I cut it up and replicated leaves and branches to build the trees around the names. I used the 'weld' tool to join it all together.

To keep the names together I joined the letters with a small line piece which was added individually to the letters to ensure best placement as some  letter by letter as sometimes the letters were joined by leaves or other pieces. Once all the hard work was done, I let the machine work its magic and give me this fabulous cut.

 The white card has some texture to it and with the intricacy of the cutouts, I had to take my time picking out the negative spaces. It was here that I noticed I had missed joining a couple of letters in Julia's name - the u and the i drop out so I needed to keep an eye on them.

 Final decisions were in relation to display. While I really like the subtlety of white on white, it really needs the shadow to set it off.

 I decided to go with a silvery aqua that takes my mind to the sea and is similar in colour to those Julia has been pinning.

Glued down and mounted in a soft silver 8 by 10 frame. 

The silver in the frame picks up the soft shimmer in the silvery aqua paper. The look is softer in real life. I think the next project will be making one of these for me!