#28 Silhouette Plates for a Witch's Kitchen

  So I am doing something a little different this year each room has a theme. The Kitchen is going to be a Faerie Tale Witches cottage, a lot of green and black, moss, branches, a real haunted forest feel. 

Usually in my wall plate holder I display my vintage happy pumpkin plates, but that is not going to work this year so I started thinking of what I could put up there instead. I have all these green plates that I over bought on clearance a few years back. They are the perfect witchy green shade for the kitchen too. 

        So I decided to do the silhouette plates I have seen for years, always liked, but never tried. 

   The first time I saw this was in a Martha Stewarts magazine. So I grabbed out my old Halloween issues and started looking. They have a variation in about every issues, with templates galore. She also has tons on her website or you could use any clip art you like. 

   

    Now I have to take a moment to defend Martha. When I bring her name up many people tell me how evil she is. But to me she is a great champion of Halloween and her Halloween epidoes were always something I looked forward to every year. So maybe she comes off as a B to some people, I don't know her personally to answer that, but she has some fantastic ideas.

Also you really start to question life when a guy dressed as Leather Face, in a bloody apron, carrying severed head lectures you about the Evils of Martha Stewart.  Please, Don't ask.

    So anyway I was drinking my glass of wine on a mellow saturday night and sometimes when I have a glass of wine I feel a little craftiness coming on. At the same time I am inpatient and want quick results.  

So therefore this tutorial is of what I like to call My Drunken Crafts. Maybe I need to make a new category on here.

I could have printed the clip art or copied the magazine images, but I was again impatient. 

Luckily I can freehand alright, so I just copied images from the magazine on regular paper 

in a size that seemed right for the plates.

Getting the image on the plate, there are a couple ways you can do this.

For this one I cut out my shape and traced around it with a sharpie.

Luckily I noticed the below picture was off center before I started. 

If you mess up a little, the sharpie does come up if you rub hard enough right away.

Next I filled it in with ceramic paint. 

As you can see it was kind of hard to get it smooth. 

The brush left brush marks and the sponges left bubbles. 

This is were patience and sobriety would have come in handy. 

I managed to get it to smooth out better by doing a second layer with the brush the next day.

The other way I did it was the opposite.

 I wanted the plate black and the witch green. I have seen this technique before where you can print the image on adhesive paper, but I didn't have any so I used a glue stick and covered all the edges really good and stuck her on the plate. 

Oh is that a glass of wine in the photo? Why yes it is.

Quickly, but with a light amount of paint (to avoid bleeding) I covered the edges

and then the whole plate in black paint.

I pulled up the stencil very gently. and it came out almost perfect, very little bleeding.

Any parts that did, I scraped off before it dried with a blade.

Again here you can see the bubbles I had to fix with a brush coat.

The colors are not as bright on camera for some reason but it's a nice witchy green in person. 

Even though it was all turned out fine, I would not recommend drinking and crafting. 

Also as soon as I can I am going to make some chargers to go behind these. In case you don't know what those are, chargers are big decorative plates that go under regular plates.  I have several ideas

in mind that involve natural materials, to the shabby up the display a bit.

I'll add the picture and how to as soon as I do it.