At the beginning of September, I moved from my beloved Seattle to central Pennsylvania. Although PA is lovely, I miss Seattle greatly. I also moved into an apartment with large expanses of white walls, unable to be painted (thanks, landlord). I had one particular wall, which faced my bed, which just ached for something awesome. So I came Crafster searching, and was assailed with awesome ideas. I saw a post (which of course I now can't find to give proper credit) of someone doing these really awesome ravens on their walls in black contact paper. Ah ha!
I started by doing a rough sketch of what the Seattle skyline looks like, and how it would look in silhouette.
I measured it and saw that it was about 3.5" x 5", and I figured I could just make those into feet and that'd be big enough. (PS, that's REALLY big, but I wouldn't figure that out until later.) At this stage in the game, I was also planning a plain black border around it, like a frame. So I made a grid from which to work.
Next came the tedious task of transferring the grid to the back of my contact paper. This was made all the more tedious by my forgetting that I needed to draw it in reverse, so I had to erase the original drawing and do it all over again. For the first drawing, I just drew the entire bottom row - so that's five feet of contact paper by one foot.
Hilarity ensued when I tried to put up that five foot strip of contact paper. Luckily it peels right off and you can put it on again.
I already started to ditch the exactness of the grid, as some things were just solid black for two grid blocks high, so I just cut them that way once instead of doing two separate ones that I'd have to match up edge to edge. But I still used my grid as a map.
For instance, good ol' Smith Tower, there, spanned two grid blocks. No way was I going to cut those out separately and try to attach them. So it went up as one giant piece. This means that there's actually a bit of overlap on the piece itself, which I can
sort of see when the light hits it right, but oh well.
Mount Rainer makes an appearance... clearly this silhouette is from somewhere on the edge of Queen Anne or something.
And finally, today, the Space Needle rose into view.
Here's a view with my bed involved so you can get an idea of the scale. And how cute my cat is. (He was surprisingly well behaved...kept his "destroy crafts" impulses under wraps for once.)
Now I see Seattle every day, even when it's 3000 miles away. :0)
(In retrospect, I find that the Space Needle's spaceship part is a little too round on the top for my liking. I may go in with an exacto knife and fix that later, but for now it's going to live just like that.)
Thanks again to whomever had those awesome ravens perched on their doorways!
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