Saturday, June 05, 2010

The Writing On the Wall

So now that you've seen Luke's nursery, I know that you're just dying to know how I made those cute letters I hung on his wall.

You weren't?

Well, I'm going to tell you anyway.

I'm a digital scrapbooker, so this was a first for me. The first time I'd ever bought scrapbooking paper, and the first time I'd ever faced the fear of putting scissors to that paper. But it was kinda fun.
  1. First, I printed the letters from my computer, after converting them to just outlines (to save ink big time!) Knowing that scrapbooking paper is 12" square, I made sure they were smaller than that. I cut them out roughly.
  2. I'm a weenie, so I did a quick scan of the papers I'd bought so I could play around with them digitally before committing to glue and scissors. When I was happy with the design, I began gluing the real paper to foam board from the dollar store. I applied plain ol' white glue with a paint brush to keep it smooth and even.
  3. I lightly taped the cut-out computer print-outs to the glued-on scrapbookpaper, and used my hot-knife to cut around each letter. It cuts through the paper and the foam like butter!
  4. I used another tool on my hot knife to shade the edges of each letter.
  5. To hang the letters, I wound twist-ties into swirls (see picture below) and hot glued them onto the back. Bend the loop out a little bit, and it sits on a push-pin nicely!

My supplies were inexpensive. I used 4 sheets of scrapbook paper, I think. They were, of course, on clearance for about 50 cents each. The foam board costs $1 for a pretty big sheet. Of course, it'll depend on the length of the name or word, and the size and font you use, but this sure beats the price of wooden letters!

I had the idea at the store today that I could use wrapping paper instead of scrapbook if I wanted, and it would really be dirt cheap!

Zach has requested that I do his name next. And it must say Zachary, not Zach or even Zachy. Of course.

1 comment:

Lora said...

I love that this is the first thing you have done with real paper, because I have never ever ever done anything remotely close to digital scrapbooking.