Silhouette UK: Mixed Media Floral Wreath Card

Hi everyone. It's Verity here from Pretty Little Button bringing you another project. Today's project features the printable cotton canvas. This media allows you to print any design out onto cotton canvas, which is more sturdy and thicker in comparison to the normal printable cotton sheets from Silhouette. This cotton canvas is adhesive too, meaning it makes it easy to apply to objects should you wish to. My idea was to use this canvas, well as a canvas to paint on. It is a different material to regular canvases you buy from an art shop and if you really do want to use this material for a lot of heavy paint, I would advising priming it first. However, as I was doing minimal painting I was able to get away with it - though note you paint will absorb into the cotton canvas. I just applied a couple of layers of the colour to blend and colour. Originally, I was going to apply this to a thick piece of heavy chipboard to create a minute painting to use as decoration. However, I got an inky handprint and therefore needed to trim it down. Instead, I turned it into a mix media card.

Mixed Media Floral Wreath Card details:

Start off by loading your design into your window. I drew a square (red line) to mimic the size of the area I wanted to apply this to so I could scale the design down. As you are going to print this out, you need to make sure of the line for the design has weight to it - usually it is set to 0pt. I opted for a pale grey line at 0.5pt. This line was darker enough to see when painting but light enough not to show through once painted.

Once it was printed, I proceed to paint the design in with acrylic paints. As this canvas was not primed, the paint initially absorbed into the media, but after one layer, the paint stopped doing this allowing me to blend and shade.

As I mentioned, I, unfortunately, got an inky handprint next to the design, so I had to change the project slightly. Instead, I decided to make a card, for which I wanted the wreath to be popped up and I didn't want the inner of the wreath to remain. I could have used my scissors to fussy cut this out, but that would of be tricky for the inner. Instead, the PixScan mat came to the rescue.

I trimmed down the canvas sheet to a small size, pealed the backing off and adhered to a thin sheet of card. I did this to add stability to the wreath when adhered to the front of my card. The card sheet was placed onto my PixScan mat and I uploaded a photo into Silhouette through the PixScan window. If you are unsure how to do this, check out this post HERE.

Next, I used the trace feature to trace the floral wreath. I cannot give you precise settings that will work for every design each time, you will have to do a bit of trial and error to work out which is best for your design. However, in order to cut the inner out, I need to make sure I just selected 'Trace' and not 'Trace Outer Edge'.

Once I had traced the wreath, I created an offset and removed the traced cut filed inside the offset. The PixScan mat was loaded into the machine, and I had to do several tests cuts to make sure the blade would cut through the cotton canvas and card. In the end, for my machine and blade, I had the following settings: Blade 10, Pressure 33, Speed 1 and 4 passes. I did worry that this would mark my mat a lot, but you can hardly see any cut lines, showing all though the setttings looked a lot, they were just right!

To assemble the card, I applied Tonic Nuvo mouse through a striped stencil. I created this stencil for a previous post which you can find that HERE. Once this was dry I foam mounted the wreath and added a layered die cut sentiment with an offset shadow. To finish I added lots of Tonic Nuvo Drops matching the mouse.