We have a couple of those lap trays with the polystyrene balls underneath  that I totally destroyed with spilt acetone and other crafting abuses.  Following the success of my Winged Eyeliner stencilled make-up tray, I decided to give our two lap trays a wee make over using scraps from other projects.

I used Coastal Blue Milk Paint from favourite brand General Finishes.  It's  a deep midnight shade that I thought would go excellently with copper.  I bought it to upcycle a funky heaxagonal drinks cabinet I found on gumtree, but figured I'd give the paint a quick whirl on these trays first.  It's a no prime, hard wearing formula, but as it's such a dark colour, the first coat might look ropey - don't worry though it all comes good on the second /third coats.

I'm addicted to the glorious world of Liberty prints.  I picked up some of this gorgeous fabric in Mandors fabric shop in Glasgow and it's been waiting patiently for me to put it to good use.  I plan to make some fabric applique cushions with the fabric, but haven't managed to get around to that just yet.  For the trays, I just used my staple gun to attach the fabric all the way round the edges.

The fabric pattern reminds me very much of mountain scapes and our holiday to Iceland last year, so I decided to cut some geometric style mountain graphics using my trustee Silhouette Cameo from vinyl.  The kind guys at MDP Supplies in Falkirk gifted me this copper vinyl as it was an end of roll and always tripping them up.  What a score, I absolutely love it!!

The only problem now is that I don't want to use these trays in fear of wrecking them!

I'd love to hear from you.  If you have a cameo too, do you use it to upcycle?  Which tray design do you prefer?

Hey there, I'm back with my favourite thing FONTS!  Today, it's all about stencil fonts, which are great for cutting out messages for tags and banners as the middles don't fall out.

I have a quick video tutorial which shows you how to convert any font of your choice into a stencil version - it's super easy just cut a little notch out to create the bridge from the background to the inside of the letter.

The tutorial above covers how to convert the letters to stencil as and when you need to. 

I decided though, that I'd like to have a shot at converting a full font into a stencil version and then create it as a proper installable font.  I managed it with the help of the free software Inkscape and Glyhr Studio.  Here's the font, it's free for download here

If you are interested in how I loaded the Lobster font and replaced the letters which needed to change with my edited versions, here's the video:

This tutorial was sparked from a question on the Silhouette facebook group that I'm a member of.  My friend wanted to know how to make something like this:

It's now super easy with my font, takes just 17 seconds!

Of course the name is a clue here, it this font can of course be used for stencils.  I used it to stencil the phrase 'Never ask a girl with winged eyeliner why she is late' onto an upcycled tray.  The tutorial for this is here on the Silhouette UK Blog