Anyone for Tennis? Cutting intricate pieces in Vinyl

Hiya, Anyone for tennis? Today I've adapted the At The Ball Park  card file from Simply Crafty SVGs into a tennis card - in fact TWO tennis cards! Thinking of the Grand Slam Tournament, I've made a US Open as well as a Wimbledon version.

Living in the UK, I don't see many baseball games (live, or televised). However, tennis features much, much more, and Wimbledon was always such a HUGE event in my household as a child. I couldn't find any dimensional tennis cards out there, so I thought the fun baseball card could be successfully adapted.

I substituted the baseball and starred balls for tennis balls, and used tennis rackets in place of the baseball bats.  The court was a little more tricky and I sliced off the baseball field and welded on an offset of the tennis court.

For my card I needed some tennis images, and I found these open source ones at Openclipart.org. However, although they can be downloaded as SVG files, they aren't what you'd call 'cut ready'.

Tennis Racket by johnny_automatic
Tennis Court by netalloy
Tennis Ball by casino

I'll have a separate post on how to manipulate the new images ready for cutting, but in this post I'm concentrating on cutting out the intricate bits in vinyl (and a surprise material)! Now, I should emphasise that all the original pieces will cut fine; it's just my new bits that were too intricate to cut from cardstock.


Tennis Court Lines

The court lines are cut from white vinyl.

The Wimbledon court has card stripes to represent the grass courts used in the UK ...

whereas the US Open court is flat blue to represent the hard courts used in the USA tournament.

The cut for the lines could have been paper (the one on the right), but paper would have been tricky to adhere without some glue residue, so self-adhesive vinyl was a 'cleaner' way to go.

Tennis Net

Now the material chosen for the net might come as a bit of a surprise. It is actually some trimmed, self-adhesive, paper lace.

Very quick and easy to apply.

Tennis Rackets

I cut the tennis racket bodies from wood-look vinyl for a retro look. They could also have been cut from silver, or coloured vinyl, to resemble steel, aluminium or carbon fibre.

As it is would have been difficult to adhere the paper handle on top of the vinyl, I trimmed off the handle first, before applying it to the cardstock backing piece. Then it was an easy matter to apply the paper handle onto the racquet.

Sentiments

The sentiments were written in LW Classic in the Silhouette Studio software and then cut from white vinyl. I love how it is possible to design custom sentiments without having to rely on using stamps or someone else's phrases.

You'll noice that I have cut extra dots for the exclamation mark. I find that this is good insurance in case one is lost along the way.

Tennis Balls

I LOVE how these tennis balls turned out. They are made of two layers, the white under part, and three separate yellow/green top pieces. The American Crafts cardstock was the perfect colour! As an aside, do you think that tennis balls are green or yellow? My husband says yellow, but I say green.

Here's the finished US version of the card.

I like them both. Which is your favourite?