Halloween Moon Over My Mantel Decal

Many of you know that we just moved into our new home a few months ago and this space above my mantel has been empty since the very first day. Yes, I have plans to one day put a large mirror here, but I’m still on the hunt for the perfect one. So, with Halloween approaching, I thought it would be fun to fill the space with a spooky decal!

Just a few quick notes here before we get to the crafty fun!

1. Yes, I cut it with my Silhouette CAMEO. You could use a Portrait, you’ll just cut a few more pieces!

2. Speaking of pieces, there were almost 60! But (and this is important!) I try to always cut WITH a mat! Cutting without a mat NEVER goes well for me and I end up wasting more vinyl than I’d be saving. If, however, you do cut without a mat successfully, it will still be 60 pieces, but a lot less runs through your machine!

3. I did draw one vertical line down the center of my wall. From there I just VERY carefully lined everything up. I decided against using registration marks for this one, even though I know I usually tell you to always use them! I just knew I was already eating through a ton of vinyl!

4. Even though I drew that line, my design was still off-center. (Around piece #3 I remember that center line was the center of the large piece of the moon…NOT the center of the actual design!) I added a few bats to the right to balance things out…no one except for me (and now all of you!) will ever know!

So, now for the software details!

The moon and crows is a design from the Silhouette store. You can find it here.

The bats I added at the end are also from the Silhouette store. (The set comes with four designs…I just used one!) You can find them here.

Once I opened the design in my Silhouette software I did have to edit one piece. This is meant to be layered, so the “crescent” part of the moon wasn’t actually included. With a bit of point editing, I got it! Then I just resized the entire thing so that it fit on a 48″ square workspace. (PS…I also always merge an image of the finished design into the cut file for reference!)

After that I created a whole lotta’ 11.5″ squares and used them to create a grid over my moon. (NOTE: I actually did this to all the pieces, but just showing it once should give you the idea!)

Then I very simply just used my knife tool to slice right on those grid marks! When you’re done, delete away those 11.5″ squares. These are the exact “puzzle” piece you’ll put together on your wall! (Now do you see why I used 11.5″ squares rather than 12″? This way I have a little bit of wiggle room when using my knife tool and know that my pieces will definitely fit on my mat!)

I repeated this process for all of my pieces. This design was pretty easy to work with…there are only five colors…so it wasn’t too hard!

(You can see that sometimes the pieces were smaller than 11.5″ square. Especially with the branches, I just tried to find easy places to split them!)

Then I weeded all of them…in front of the TV with a glass of wine!

I also numbered them so that the next day when I went to put them up, I had a good idea of what order to move in.

And then the fun! You can see in the video below how I put up *almost* every piece. (*My video camera was NOT on its best behavior yesterday!) 

And you’ll also see that yes, there were a few pieces that went up, and then came back down! Everyone makes mistakes! But all in all, it was so fun, A LOT easier than I thought it would be, and this is absolutely my new favorite Halloween decoration in my house!

And PS…I know many of you are thinking what happens after Halloween?!?!?! And this year, unfortunately, this is coming down. This one IS NOT reusable. I do, however, have a few ideas for I’m going to make my Christmas decal last for years to come! Stay tuned!