Dragons and Wizard Lantern

So last night my husband says he has a challenge for me...I love it when he says that, because he's really good at giving me ideas, and he lets me run in whatever direction I want to go with it.

First he said he wants me to make a Spring lantern with soft colors and flowers. I knew for sure I could create something for him, but it seemed a little odd that he would have this sort of request. Well before I even picked out the color scheme in my head he said, on second thought, make a lantern with dragons and wizards...something cool!

Ok, now this is much more his style. I was actually excited to start thinking of how I would create this lantern, and I of course used my favorite SVG Cuts Oak Lantern, but I just used the plain lantern and welded in the dragons. 

I'm no expert on creating dragons, so I Googled images for dragons, and when I found one that was black and white and looked cool, I saved the image and opened the image in Inkscape.

Then I clicked on the image and after it was selected, I went to Path and selected Trace Bitmap.

In the Trace Bitmap window I selected update, then pressed OK. At this point weird dots of the image appear in the window and at that point I closed the window and there were two images on my board.

One of them has arrows really close around the image, and the other has arrows further outside of the image. I deleted the one with the arrows further away from this image (the original picture) and what's left is a cleaned up version, which makes it easy to cut from my machine.

The only step left was to save it as an SVG and then I was able to open it in my eCAL program and re-size it to fit in the windows of the lantern.

I added some stars to two of the lantern tops from eCALs library.

For the vellum, I didn't want just plain vellum, I wanted a cool purple/orange color, so I created my own gradient version of purple to orange in Photoshop, then added a crystallized filter.

You can click on the picture and save it, then open it and print onto your 8.5"x11" vellum.

As far as the wizard hat goes, I used SVG Cuts Happy Birthday to You file for the party hat. I used stars from the library to make it look more like a wizards hat. SVG Cuts also has a free party hat on their site as well, but the one in the Happy Birthday set has ruffled edges that I used to glue to the base of the hat. One more note for the hat, I created a circle within a circle for the rim so that you can set the hat right over the top or take it off.

I used 22 gauge floral wire for the  handle and additional decorations (like the wands with paper stars on top). I also dressed up the hat with yellow ribbon and a black buckle.

Thanks for looking at my husband inspired project :)

Hope you're having a wonderful weekend!