Vintage birds as canvas window and wall stickers

As the trees outside my window lose their leaves, it is nice to have some new birdies to keep me company. This is a super easy tutorial suitable for a beginner and uses Silhouette's printable canvas.

EQUIPMENT:

Silhouette cameo or Portrait

Colour printer

Silhouette Printable canvas

Vintage bird file print and cut #17950

STEPS:

Open the file in Silhouette. Select and ungroup the birds. You will find each bird on a rectangle of white as shown below. Select a bird together with the red cut line and go to Modify which lies in the menu at the top of your design area, on the RHS. Select Crop. You now have the bird on its own, but it has no cut line, so with it selected, go to Cut settings (top right) and click Cut edge.

The reason I do this is so I can arrange lots of birds on one page without that white rectangle getting in the way.

I make copies of the birds, mirror some of the images and make some smaller ones. 99% of the time I use A4 sheets of card, but as I am using Silhouette media, the size of the canvas is "Letter" so I select that as my page layout, and switch on the red lines to Show Cut Border. The birds must be arranged within this border. You also need Registration Marks switched on.

Put the canvas face down in your printer tray, and print. Remove from the printer and attach to a mat. Feed this into your Silhouette.

Within the software Cut settings, select "Printable cotton canvas". Adjust your blade manually to a depth of 5 and Send to Silhouette. The cuttings will be made twice. It is easy to peel the cut birds off the backing paper and as they have an adhesive backing, you are ready to stick them around your house.

I can almost hear them squabbling! Another idea to try is to take the outline of a bird, fill it with a pattern and print that onto canvas. I hope you will give this a go!

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