Two years ago I was thinking about making a series of keys using craft activities I loved as a child. One of those activities was colouring fuzzy - or velvet - posters. I wondered how I could design and make my own fuzzy posters and it wasn’t long until I was online doing some research. Two methods seemed to hold the most promise: cutting a design out of black velour paper and then gluing that paper to some good poster-type paper or drawing a design onto some good poster-type paper and then flocking that design. Eventually I used both methods.

Around that contemplation time I saw a shadow puppet theatre show by the dynamic and creative Wide Open Theatrical Escapades company. I marveled at the puppets they created and was very intrigued to learn about the cutting machines they used to help them with their work. This was particularly thrilling for me as I know I am only so good with an x-acto knife and I didn’t want to spend a year cutting out poster bits (instead I spent over half a year embroidering a poster design but that’s another story). Head puppet wrangler Crispi Lord was gracious enough to give me a tour of her workshop and show me how her cutting machine - a Silhouette Curio - worked. Inspired I ordered my own machine and then set off on a long path to complete the childhood craft inspired keys.

Eventually I got over my intimidation and used my Curio to make things (like my faux “stained glass” keys) and now, finally, I have made some fuzzy posters and completed an epic journey through my past!

Luckily for me I already had ten key patterns from this childhood craft series when I decided to make some posters. I also drew some more designs based on photos of keys I have made and put them into the Silhouette design program using a PixScan mat.

Initially I had thought of drawing out the entire design but in the end decided it would be best to do most of the layout right on the computer.

Next I loaded in the velour paper (bought on-line because I couldn’t find any locally) and pressed start.

It took some trial and error to figure out the correct blade depth but for the most part the process went smoothly (except for sometime around the 8th poster design - things got into a right mess then and the design cut over itself and then on a second attempt only half of itself and then on a third attempt I ended up with two designs on one poster and a good chunk of the design off of the paper and into the cutting mat…a software update, making the mat sticky again, and a new day corrected the problem).

It was really fun to poke (or “weed” as they say in the machine cutter world) out the image. I used scraps to make additional key designs on the posters. Even though not all the keys are colourable I am counting them - because 5000 is a lot (like, a lot!).

I am very happy with how this turned out. And really, when I stop and think about it, it is beyond cool that I could actually make a fuzzy poster! I decided to finish designing all of the posters before I started colouring them.

Here is my first poster (and all the keys it contains):