My First Commission

My crafting is my hobby, and apart from making a few items for the Christmas charity stall etc, I have no desire to sell my 'makes', or fulfil orders for anyone. However, my youngest son's partner has just celebrated a significant birthday, and when Ben asked me if I could make 'one of your vinyl thingys' for him to give to Dave, of course I said I would. And I really enjoyed doing it too. I was given a list of his favourites - colour, quote, song, poem, book etc, and I chose to  work with the colour and the poem because I liked it so much.

I read it through a couple of times and picked out the images that came to me; a winding path with a small boy walking on it, trees with swirling falling leaves, and a dandelion head with the seeds blowing away.

I chose a blue background from a digi-scrapbook kit, and searched in google images for other ideas. Eventually I settled on these two.

I made the background layer the right proportions to match the plain black frame I had bought, and in adobe photoshop I changed the hue of the road to blend with the background, faded it out and stretched it to fit. Then I digitally cut the little boy and added him as a layer onto the road, again changing the hue to blue, and making him a suitable size. His trousers stood out as still having a brown tint so I then cut them out separately and turned them a true blue and added them over the brown ones. For the leaves and seed head I used elements from several digi scrapbook kits, trying to get them all to similar tones of blue. I faded each of them so no one stood out from the others, and then I flattened it all into a jpeg image, and used Publisher to size it to fit the frame exactly, and printed it out.

I printed out the poem in several different fonts and sent them to Ben to chose, and once he had decided, I printed it in my Silhouette cameo software, fiddling around with size and spacing until it was just right, and then I cut it from Black vinyl. I knew if I used a sheet of transfer paper to lift it in one go, I would risk sticking to and tearing the printed background, so I did a few lines at a time. The spacing isn't perfect, but Ben didn't want me to do it again, and said he couldn't see what I was worrying about! Considering how small the print was, it cut really well, though of course it was fun weeding out all the tiny centres of the 'closed' letters. I only had to re-cut a couple of letters, and eight dots for the 'i's'!

So here is the finished project.

I have tried to add this as a large photo so you can read the words which I find quite moving, especially the last few lines. He wrote it when his young son first went away to boarding school. (The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that a letter is missing in the last verse. Fortunately I spotted this and was able to put it right).

Also fortunately, my husband made an unexpected visit to UK last month, and was able to take this with him and hand-deliver it. I promised I would not put it on my blog until it had been given. The birthday has now passed and I am told he was thrilled with it, and of course, it is quite unique, which it makes it a special gift.  

So that is my first commission done and dusted. I'm not looking to do any more but I'm always happy to do something for one of my boys!