Monogramming with the Silhouette

For Christmas, I received a fabulous gift - a Silhouette Portrait! It is just like the Cameo, just a couple inches smaller. I have been playing with cutting paper over the past few weeks, and finally received some vinyl to experiment with. However, recently, I have really taken a liking to monogramming. I purchased an app called Monogram It! for my Android phone (apparently, it's also for iPhone, too), and I started off monogramming my phone wallpaper, but that was not good enough. I wanted to do more! So what was my first vinyl project? A monogrammed ring dish!

The dish is a small porcelain "dip bowl" that was only $2 from Target. I used the app to create a monogram, emailed the image to myself, then traced it into the Silhouette Studio software to cut my vinyl. Once cut, It took me a few tries to get it just right into the dish, and even now it doesn't seem perfectly centered. But, after several attempts, I got frustrated and just decided it was good enough. Haha! It is just for us, so I figure it doesn't need to be perfect.

My husband takes his wedding ring off when he washes his hands, or showers, so I thought the ring dish would be a really cute place for him (and me!) to put our rings when we need to take them off. (Let us not mention the fact that he lost his ring twice over the last 2 weeks. First time, he fell in the snow, and it flew off - we had to wait until the snow melted outside to find it. And more recently, he lost it at the dog park while throwing a frisbee - we had to go back to find it. We were VERY lucky to have found it, both times.)

Anyway, next, I wanted to monogram my phone! This turned out much better, I think. I am totally pleased with how the back of my phone turned out. I keep a clear case over my phone, and this will be completely visible, even with the case on.


I love my Silhouette Portrait, I feel like I can do so much with it! Pretty much anything I can think of to make with it will make fabulous gifts and fun trinkets, not to mention make my smash booking and junk journaling so much better!

Thrift Store Finds

Recently, my love for Smash Booking has turned into something called junk journaling. Junk journaling is all about taking stuff normal people would throw away, such as cereal boxes, old magazines, scraps of fabric, and turning them into a journal. Junk journals usually have pockets, envelopes, and literally anything else you can bind into one. I love the idea, because to be completely honest: we never have any spare money, so crafting without a budget for it is really hard! The fact that I can do my crafts, which is just made from things we normally throw away is awesome.

I don't normally carry cash (perhaps it is the Californian in me who grew up in bad neighborhoods, I prefer to carry cards), so we don't normally go to thrift stores, or anything of the like. Since, the majority of them do not like to allow debit cards on small purchases.

We had a couple extra dollars one day, and I talked my husband into taking me thrifting. We headed out to one of the biggest thrift stores that I know. Well, actually, its a large consignment store, but they have a huge variety of things there! I was after two things: lace ribbon and piano sheet music. Tyler was such a trooper, he was looking through practically every box and every book in each booth. We were there for about 2 hours, looking through everything. But we didn't come out empty handed!

My first find was this lace. Very beautiful scrap pieces of lace, which I love. I am on a huge lace kick right now, I love it!

However, my biggest score was these. Little individual pamphlet things, of sheet music. They were the more expensive purchase, but I absolutely love them! They are very old, I have no clue what songs they are, but they literally took my breath away when I saw them on the shelf. They were everything I was looking for. I just know I am going to have a hard time in parting with these beauties.