Using Contact Paper to Make a Deer Silhouette

I’ve fallen for the animal silhouette fad – especially around the holidays. I can’t help it!

I have not fallen for the vinyl cutting machines, like the Cricut, which would make creating a silhouette so much easier. I just haven’t been able to stomach the price tag on those puppies. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have one, but then I’d be afraid to waste the vinyl, so then it wouldn’t get used like it should. It’s a vicious cycle, people!

It’s often these moments of cheapness frugality that lead me to get a little desperate creative.

So, I came home from preschool drop-off last week, did my happy dance that I had 3 blissful hours to myself and then raided the craft closet for a roll of contact paper that I have never used to line drawers. Totally normal, right?

Then I found a deer head silhouette on the internet, enlarged it to about 250% and printed it off. I didn’t directly trace it, although I did consider that angle. I just wanted the whole image to be larger than what I was willing to print out on my printer.

So, I used the print-out as a guideline and freehand drew the image on the back of the contact paper.

Excuse the bad iPhone pictures. I wasn’t sure this would even turn out, so I didn’t bother getting out the good camera. As you can see, there are some eraser marks as I adjusted my drawing to look right. And since I am not an artist, I know that if I can do this, you can too!

After that, it was as easy as cutting it all out with my scissors! Here’s the result. I reminded myself that a deer grows these antlers in the wild and they are perfectly imperfect in their natural state – so mine could be too!

Now all I had to do was peel the backing off and attach the contact paper to something, anything.

I had a board prepped in the basement for another project. Since that project has stalled out while I figure out what I am doing, I decided to borrow the board for my silhouette.

I’ll admit that it was a little tricky peeling the backing off those antlers. I started at the bottom of the image where there was a solid piece of contact paper and worked my way up. I just took it nice and slow and everything worked out fine. Phew! Honestly, I spent more time staring at the board trying to decide where to position the silhouette than all the time it took me to draw and cut out the darn thing.

All in all, this was about a 30-minute project. Not bad, right? I even surprised myself. As a last bit of flourish, I added a red nose cut out of construction paper and adhered with tape.

Now, here’s the deal with contact paper. It’s only super sticky when you don’t want it to be. Murphy’s Law, folks. So since my board was ever so slightly rough, I did have a problem with a few of the antlers staying stuck. A little double-sided tape would have done the trick, but I opted for the grade school approach and whipped out the glue stick. It worked great. The main body of the deer stuck to the board just fine without any assistance.

I did add a homemade yarn garland to the bottom for a little extra somethin’-somethin’. Even Rudolph needs some bling at Christmas.

This is one of those crafts that made me so happy because it turned out better than I hoped it would. That doesn’t always happen around here! This little project is bringing a little holiday cheer to our office right now. He’s sitting on the cabinet that hides our printer.