DIY Magnetic Silly Faces

I recently shared this fun tutorial for Silly Magnetic Faces over on I {heart} Nap Time last week as part of a fun week of Silhouette inspired projects.  I know not many of you are able to have a Silhouette machine, but the fun thing about this tutorial, is that you don’t need to have one to be able to make these for your little ones.  All you would have to do is simply cut them out the old fashioned way.  To learn exactly how I made them you can follow along with the tutorial below.

I just recently was able to try out Silhouette’s Printable Magnet Paper for the first time.  I thought about making something more practical like cute labels for my family’s organization board, but I went for something a little more fun and creative…Magnetic Silly Faces!

They were an instant hit at our house.  My daughter loved laughing at herself and the various ways she could make herself silly.  The best part is how easy it was to make and put together.

I simply started by taking a close up picture of my daughter and then downloaded it into my Photoshop program.  I was sure to take the picture with a white background behind her (a wall) to provide minimal distraction in the finished product.  Make sure to have the person looking at you straight on.

Crop your picture so that it is measures 8 x 10 and print it out onto a non-glossy photo paper.  Set it aside.

*You could make this smaller depending on what you would like, I wanted mine to fit in an 8×10 inch frame without a matte.  Do what works best for your needs.  You could also print it out so that it fits into a fun tin carrying case like they sell at scrapbook store for a more portable version.

In the Silhouette program I was able to download all of these fun shapes to use to make the silly faces.  With my daughters picture still up in the edit window of Photoshop, I measured how big I needed each object using the ruler grid.  For example, to determine how big the glasses needed to be, I measured where I wanted the end of the glasses to come on each side of her face and determined that the glasses needed to be 7 inches across.  Then I measured the height to be 3 inches from above the eyes to where I wanted them to sit below the eyes. 

After determining the measurements needed for each item, I adjusted the sizes of each object accordingly.  It seems like a long process, but was actually pretty easy with this new Silhouette program. 

*One thing I learned is to make them a little bit bigger than the actual measurements.  I wish I made mine each a bit bigger.  I will make the adjustments when I make these for the rest of my kids {because apparently it wasn’t fair that I only made one for someone else…imagine that!?!}

When you have everything ready, print them from the Silhouette program onto the Magnet paper in your regular printer.  Make sure that you load the magnet paper properly so that it will print on the white side.  Then place it onto your cutting mat feed that into your Silhouette SD machine and line it up according to your registration marks.  Cut the paper.  I set machine to a cutting speed of 4, a thickness of 22 and used the yellow cutting blade and it worked perfectly.

Now that the silly face pieces are cut you can take your photo and cut it so that it fits into a picture frame.  Then I took some sheet metal, that I had leftover from the same organization board I mentioned and linked to in the first paragraph, and traced the picture on it to know exactly where to cut it.

Cut the sheet metal out with some tin snips.  Be very careful with this as the metal can be pretty sharp on the edges.

Place the metal sheet into the frame and place the picture on top of it.  This makes it so you can store the silly face pieces on the back when they are not in use and keeps them nicely hidden away.

Pretty fun and simple right??  I thought so!  There are so many different ways you could use these to entertain your kids depending on the different sizes you made them and whether you wanted them to be portable or not!

This one was my daughter’s favorite.  She thought it looked just like me!  I am hoping the jury is still out on that one!

And when the picture is not being used to make silly faces, you can use it as a regular photo to add some fun to your child’s room.  Pretty versatile right?  Thanks Silhouette for providing us with another fun media to play and create with!!

 Linking up here:

Blue Cricket Design