breaking in the silhouette.

You may have noticed in my last post that Mr. Spouse snagged a Silhouette for me as a "happy end of the school year" treat! Oh my. Talk about HOTY (husband of the year, in layman's terms). Saying that I was eager to cut away would be quite the understatement - I just couldn't decide what needed to be assaulted with perfectly trimmed paper!

After wandering around la casita for entirely too long, I ultimately decided on the fridge door's bins:

I mean, they were practically begging to be labeled, no? I headed over to Michael's to grab some vinyl to start creating the labels, but only found baby pink vinyl. I figured baby pink labels might not be the best way to say "thanks" to Mr. Spouse for my new toy, so I scampered over to the scrapbook papers where my refusal to buy pink vinyl was divinely confirmed with my discovery of this:

A Missoni chevron print on paper?! I die. Better yet, the pack of 25 sheets of yummy chevron was only $2.99. "Reckless, high-speed" driving may or may not describe the way I made my way home to get started.

After oohing and aahing over all of the prints in the pack, I narrowed my options down to these two prints:

Not being able to choose one, I decided I would cut my labels from both of the prints and then decide which one looked better.

I laid out all of the labels to choose the winner:

But, honestly, I wasn't feeling the Missoni madness. I felt like the chevron stripes really just looked like randomly assorted lines on the letters and you really didn't get to see all of the fabulous colors and print. That's when I started eyeing the pages from which the letters had been cut.

I decided it might be just as cool to have a "reverse outline" of the letters so that you could see the entire spectrum of colors and get a sense of the chevron print. So I separated each label and got ready to mod podge!

I started the application process by emptying out all of the door bins...

...and placing all of the contents into the body of the refrigerator so they wouldn't ruin.

After removing and washing out the bins to insure I was working with a clean surface, I marked the center of each bin with a bit of painter's tape so that I could apply the label in the middle of the bin a bit more easily.

I then applied a very thin layer of mod podge to the back of the label...

...and then lined up the center of the label with my painter's tape marker on the bin.

I then brushed on a thicker layer of mod podge to the top of the label.

While the mod podge was still wet, I applied the centers of all applicable letters using the Silhouette placement tool:

I repeated this process on each of the bins until all of them were finished!

After allowing the bins to dry until the mod podge was clear, I used the same process to apply a single rectangle of teal paper on the other side of the bin fronts in order to make the letters pop out a bit more than they would have with just the clear surface of the bin.

Once everything was dry and lovely, I started loading the bins with their contents!

I really like the look of the reverse outline so much better than the isolated letters I had been considering!

What a fun, happy pop of color in an unexpected spot, no?