Eva strikes again.

I am certain by now you know of my love for our Silhouette machine. Look what a little vinyl did for these teacher end-of-year gifts. Instant personalized cups for summer!

And…I saw some family tree prints with the little birds (for each birdie in the family!) awhile ago and decided that I wanted to tackle family trees too…only doing it as canvas/painted art. With THREE best girls with June birthdays, I decided this was the craft to try. With only a minor set-back, I think they turned out pretty good.

I started with some square blank canvases (thanks to Hobby Lobby!), and painted them a base color – the color I wanted the trees to be – not the major color.

And then I cut out the tree & birds with Eva and adhered it onto the canvas.

This is a good way to use up bits and scraps of odd colored vinyl, since you are not really using the applique. I used outdoor vinyl, because it is what we had. It is however, very hard to make sure the edges are really applied well on the canvas. I tried to smooth it down while I pressed on the back of the canvas to make sure it was adhered. (This will become important in a minute or two…)

Then…paint your overall color over the top of the vinyl.

(Yes, sorry about switching paintings on you…same steps, different tree and colors!)

Let dry, and peel the vinyl up. You *should* see your object outlined and colored in the color that you put down first.

And it DID work, but since I didn’t get all of my edges all pressed down perfectly, my tree and birds were kind of jaggy. So I ended up repainting the tree by hand to get it nice and smooth and neat. But at least I had a good outline to follow and didn’t have to freehand it.

The text, on the other hand, did not fare so well. So I ended up cutting the text out of vinyl again and just using the text instead of the paint trick.

There was no way I was getting nicely printed text from my paintbrush. It worked just as well.

I think they were liked by all, and I can’t wait to make one for us for our new kitchen.