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Are you looking for a special gift to give someone? Something that’s not an everyday-bought-from-the-store type gift? Well my grandfather passed away a couple years ago and for Christmas I wanted to do something special for my grandmother and my son whom was very close to him. So, I had the idea of taking his handwriting and putting it on a pallet sign for them.
To begin my project – I found old cards my grandfather had written to us and I took a clear picture of them with my cell phone. Then sent them to my laptop where I could pull them up through my Silhouette software. Now if you don’t have a Silhouette – I highly recommend getting one if you can. I have made so many projects with it. In my opinion – it’s much better than a Cricut! You can find the Silhouette here in an awesome bundle deal.
So after I transferred the pictures from my cell phone to my laptop, I pulled them up in the Silhouette software and “traced” the image. Now this part can be a little tricky. A lot of the time you’ll have no choice but to trace everything and little “specks” end up in your trace. This is the tedious part – you’ll have to very carefully edit your traced image to clean it up a bit so when you cut it out, you won’t have those specks everywhere.
How to trace handwriting In Silhouette
*In your Silhouette Studio software – go to File, Library, Import Library
*Select your image and click “ok”
*Go to File, Library, Library, click on my own designs – and select the image you just saved.
*In the Trace tab, click on “select trace area” and move your curser to select the area you want to trace. Here you will have to manipulate your scale, threshold, High and Low filters to select exactly what you want to trace. I almost always click off of the high filter and bring the scale to 0. Then I usually manipulate the threshold until I have a clear image highlighted. When ready – click on “trace”.
*Remove the back image and delete it.
*Size the image, clean it up, and you’re ready to cut! If you’re making a pallet sign – remember to weed the inside, not the outside of the image so you can form a stencil to paint.
These pallet signs are such a great gift for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Birthdays, or Christmas! I love sentimental gifts!
If you don’t have the funds to purchase the silhouette yourself, but you want to gift this idea, please let me know. I can make projects with handwriting.
