Father's day

We have prepared a little surprise for father's day at the low budget end. I fell in love with the silhouettes ever since I've first seen them on Molly's blog. After that I've noticed them here and there on the web, NieNie makes her children's every year and hangs them on the entrance hall, Lu made wonderful ones last year, but I've never made time to try it. Until now. And I have to thank Lu for that. She decided to make stencils on a T-shirt with her boys' silhouettes this year. I have considered the idea also but in the end I made the simple paper ones. I've used Molly's method: take pictures, upload them on the computer, crop and adjust the size of the pictures to fit the frames, trace the contours with a soft pencil on baking paper, then cut with a scalpel both through the baking paper and the black paper, put it in the frame with white background et voila!

The background doesn't match the matting, I'm gonna have to change that later. The CD is also part of the present. I don't know much about Michael Nyman's music except that I love the soundtrack of Jane Campion's "The Piano" (as well as the whole movie). This CD is not exactly what I hoped but I think I'll grow to like it. Hopefully V will like it too and will not read this tonight to spoil the surprise.

So making the silhouettes was easy and it was fun for the kids. They didn't really help much but they enjoyed watching. I mean, there was playing and bickering and even screaming going on next to me while I was working, at some point I've lost my nerve and went to the other room because "I can't do ONE thing with you guys!!!", which has upset terribly Andrei. He started crying and gave me a heartbreaking "Mommy, you are mean FOR us", which woke me up. I've apologized to them, hugged them, told them I was sorry and I shouldn't have said such a thing, and "Let's try to work together!". All was well after that. They were excited to see how their form appeared from the black paper, and can't wait to give the present to daddy.

Here are the pictures I've used:

I think Ana's profile is a bit too small but I wanted to have her ponytail in the picture. Our frames are quite small, they hold 9x16 cm pictures without matting, but with bigger frames it would be even easier to cut the silhouettes.

Now will have to pack everything and wait till Sunday. Happy father's day to everyone!