It's starting to feel a lot like Christmas

School's out for Christmas break, today we got the tree and the holiday festivities are in full swing. I've had this Robertson's marmalade lid sitting on my work table for months with the aim of putting a tiny silhouette in it and today was the day. When the Christmas tree is up later it will be our newest ornament addition.

We followed Rachel's suggestion for peppermint bark earlier this week and made it for the teachers. Ours doesn't look as pretty as the batch Rachel showed us, or the one in the original recipe at Brown Eyed Baker. We used Green & Blacks white chocolate which has small bits of vanilla in it and it's very yellow – but I can tell you it was very tasty regardless of it's less than perfect appearance.

Also, I got into the habit of melting chocolate in the microwave, why, I don't know. This time because of  the large quantity of chocolate I popped it in a huge stainless steel bowl and put it over a giant pot of boiling water so the kids could do all the stirring and watch the melting process happen more easily. They loved it - probably their favourite culinary adventure to date, I highly recommend it.

We made jars like these on the right for gifting the peppermint bark, a pattern for them is coming soon ;)

Tiny tutorial
The silhouette project above was very easy but it was so tiny to cut that I gave up after several tries and decided to Photoshop her instead. It was very easy to do and I'm sure any image editing program would work, here's how to do it:

• Measure the inside of your lid to find out what size you'd like the image to be, mine was just under 2.5" or about 6cm in diameter.
• Photograph your subject in profile against a plain, light background then open the image in your image editing program.
• Reduce your image to a size that will fit within your lid and save it to 300 pixels per inch.
• Select the light background and then invert it. In Photoshop you would select the background with the magic wand then choose "Select" from the menu, then "Inverse." This step will make your subject selected.
• Lastly fill the selection of the subject with black (make sure the background is white)
• Print it out on to heavy weight paper, cut it into a circle (fitting the diameter of your lid) around the subject and glue it to the inside of the lid.
• Glue a looped ribbon to the back, finished.

Note: Gimp is a very good, free image editing program, I'm not that familiar with all of it's features but I bet it could handle the simple tasks for this project. Also, cutting the silhouette out probably would have worked with manicure scissors, my embroidery scissors were not tiny enough.

Now I'm hoping my boy will pose for his profile so we can have a matched set, but now I must make a start on some Christmas cards.

Comments

[Cheryl]

That silhouette ornament is SOOOO adorable!

[Christy]

I love the silhouette ornaments! Very clever! Thank you for sharing the Christmas spirit!

[saganaga]

ah, you tried the peppermint bark recipe - it IS yummy !

you turned a jar into a mushroom ! how clever you are !

what a cool lid with the silhouette --- i do plan on making these silhouettes of my kids some day soon...

[Hashi]

I made the peppermint bark too. It was good! I love your silhouette, it's adorable.

[Ruth]

I love your shilouette! The peppermint bark looks great too.

[Katy]

love the silhouette - very pretty!

Christmas is coming too quickly. I'm having a panic!!!!

[Nicole FollowtheWhitebunny]

Great job on the silhouette! I use Gimp too for a lot of stuff (because it's free!) but it can be quite challenging to learn how to use it!

[Alli]

I love the ornament! Yup, Gimp is definitely capable of doing that - I use it for all of my image editing. Mmmmm, your peppermint bark looks delicious! I might need to add that to my list of things to do today!

[margie oomen]

your blog sure looks like christmas with this post.
Love every little thing.

[Sonia]

I was going to say about the same as Margie, but she said it better than me ! :D
Mmmm that peppermint bark ... oh yum !! oxox

[Amy {giftofgreen}]

J - You are so marvelous! I love the lid silhouette and how the checked border on the lid becomes part of the design. Happy holidays!