Fabric Silhouette Tutorial

I wanted to do a craft that was centered on my kids.  Something to keep for years that would have special meaning.  When my kids are grown I want to have things to look at and remember their cuteness.

Do you remember this Post Embroidery Hoops? Embroidery hoops really are coming back, and in such a fun way! I thought it would be so cute to applique silhouettes of my beautiful children and display them in embroidery hoops.

I’ve seen silhouettes made of paper, but I really wanted to make mine out of fabric.  The Ribbon Retreat has such AWESOME fabric, how can a girl resist?

The fabric I chose for the silhouettes is Green Lined squiggles, Pink Lined Squiggles, and Orange Stripe from the Vintage Groove Collection by ADORNit.  I Appliqued the silhouettes to Ivory fabric by Bella Solids.

–Supplies–
Fabric
Embroidery Hoop
Fabric Mod Podge
Hot Glue Gun (optional)

This project is mostly easy… the hard part is getting the kids to sit still and getting a good profile shot.   I never could get a good shot of my daughter and I ended up ruining hers because of it.

These are the pictures of my kids that I used to make their silhouettes. You can see my daughter is scrunching her neck a little bit and she is also frowning. I think her frowny face messed up the nice curve of her forehead. Try to get the kids to sit or stand up straight so that their chin looks good and their neck is long.

I took the pictures, cropped them and printed them out.

I cut out their profiles very carefully trying to cut around each hair spike.

I pinned their profile to the fabric and cut it out.

Here is the fabric after it has been cut. My daughter’s does not look like her at all! It looks really weird actually! LOL

Cut a contrasting fabric a little bigger than your embroidery hoop.  Set it aside for later.

This is my favorite part!! Instead of using iron on to applique I used Fabric Mod Podge! It was SO SO SO easy!! From now on I am going to use this method for most of my applique projects.  It is machine washable too! I had no problem with wrinkles either, it went on so smooth and it stuck to the other fabric really well.

To applique fabric with this method brush an even coat of Fabric Mod Podge over the wrong side of the entire profile.

Then place the sticky side of the profile to the right side of your contrasting fabric piece.  Rub it smooth and you are done!  If you use this method to applique fabric to clothing wait at least 24 hours for it to dry completely.

Put the silhouette in an embroidery hoop and trim the edges.  If you want to you can glue the edges to the back of the embroidery hoop with a Hot Glue Gun.

The squiggles on this silhouette are a tiny bit distracting but I really do like the way the ones of my boys turned out.  I will have to try again to get a decent looking one of my daughter!

Click on this link How To Applique if you would like another option to applique your silhouette.