Faux-Etched Glass Blocks

Today’s free shape is so versatile that I almost couldn’t decide how I wanted to use it…there were just so many ideas floating around in my head! I thought this design was begging to be cut out of vinyl though, and I wanted to try something a little different, so I used some Silhouette Frosted Glass Vinyl to create these faux-etched Christmas glass blocks.

I often alter the designs I buy from the online store at least just a little bit, but this shape was perfect as is…so all I needed to do for the center block was to resize my shape, cut, weed, and apply it to the glass via transfer paper. The letters would need to be created from scratch in order to coordinate with the style of the wreath, so I started by using the Text Tool to type a “J” and a”Y” using the font “LD Hallmark” from the online store. I thought the squiggly, classic feel of this font worked well with the vintage wreath.

I wanted my letters to be slightly thicker, but a bold weight is not provided with this font so I used the Offset Tool to fake it. I also wanted my letters to be an outline in order to match the look of the wreath, so I simply used an offset of 0.15 inches twice – first an offset of the original letter to create the bolded letter and then an offset of the bolded letter to create a bold outlined letter. I chose the “Corner” option of the Offset Tool to retain the rough squiggliness (not a word) of the font.

After deleting the original typed letter from the center of these designs, selecting each set of lines and clicking “Make Compound Path”, and filling my new shapes with color to check the appearance of my design, this is what I was left with:

To bring the three blocks together even more stylistically, I wanted to add a bit a holly garland to my new shapes. This design matched the style of the wreath really nicely and was perfect to make the holly look like it was wrapped around my letters with only a few minor changes. By ungrouping the shape, deleting the extra berries, and resizing it to about 60%, my holly was ready to be placed around my letters.

I rotated two of each holly branch and placed them over top of my letters. When I was satisfied with the placement, I used the Weld Tool to create a single design to cut for each block.

This is how my final designs looked in the Silhouette Studio software.

All that I needed to do now was to cut them out of the Silhouette Frosted Glass Vinyl like I had with the wreath, weed the designs, and transfer them to my glass blocks using transfer paper and the scraper tool. Here is a closer look at the frosted glass vinyl on these blocks: