A Little Motivation!

For this week's Weekly Shape Challange on the Silhouette Blog, you had a choice to use the weekly free shape or the selected shape, a vinyl phrase by Kolette Hall.   I chose the vinyl phrase because who doesn't need a little motivation sometimes.

I loaded the phrase to my silhouette and sized it down to around 7x9 so it would fit on the 8x10 canvas that I was using.  Once it was ready to cut, I loaded my contact paper only because I ran out of vinyl, and used the settings: media-vinyl, speed-8, thickness-3, blade-2.  I had found the settings online for working with contact paper and it really worked great.

Once everything was cut, I used clear contact paper to transfer the phrase to the canvas.  I used an old gift card I had to to rub across to make sure the letters would stick to the contact paper.

 Then came the time to transfer the letters to the canvas. The canvas was painted gray by one of my girls about a month ago, so I decided to use it, but I painted the bottom part in a tangerine so the work "Awesome" would be a different color.  This is really where everything kinda went wrong, but I was determined to make it work.  I used the gift card to rub across the canvas to make sure the letters would stick, but they didn't, so i had to very carefully lift the contact paper away from the letters.  This process took a while.  I will have to buy some more vinyl so I don't have this problem again.

Well the letters were not adhering to the canvas, so I remember reading somewhere that if you put a light coat of mod podge over the letters that will take care of the problem of paint running under them.  I figured why not!

 Well the mod podge trick worked, so I was able to paint over the phrase with white paint, it took 2 coats.  After letting the paint dry thoroughly it was time to remove the letters.  That was interesting considering I used the mod podge and 2 coats of thick paint, but I got them removed and am very happy with how it turned out!

 Here is the finished project hanging in my home office/craft room!