New Bedroom Art

February 01, 2016

New Bedroom Art

Happy February everyone!

I've been struggling to figure out what kind of artwork to put in our master bedroom. I really love having pieces that have special meaning. A couple months ago I was reading a blog post from House by Hoff (here) on how she created this large song lyric sign. It looks very similar to ones you can find in stores or on Etsy. But this one was DIY and very inexpensive. Plus, the great thing is that you can choose what you want it to say and want type of font you want to use. I chose to use our Wedding verse for this one. Since it will go in our master bedroom, I love the idea of being able to see and read the verse everyday as a reminder of our promises to each other.

Like April, I went to Menards and purchased a sheet of Edge Glued Pine, 24 x 36. (link) This cost about $15. I painted the entire thing with some leftover Vintage Linen chalk paint.(I didn't sand the board down before I painted, mostly because I'm impatient and just didn't care) I wasn't sure what I wanted to do as a border for it, so I used some painters tape, 1" thick and taped all the edges. Next was trying to figure out a font and getting the sizing correct.

I found the font I liked from dafont.com and downloaded it. This one is called Tabitha. I sent my document to print in landscape and the font size to 95. I cut the printed papers into strips and layed them out on the board.

With a pencil, I traced each letter pressing down pretty hard to create an indent on the wood. Now, this is where I made a change from the tutorial that I used. Pressing down really hard to trace the letters was really hard on my hand. I switched it up by turning the paper around and tracing the letters with the pencil. Then, I turned the paper over and rubbed the pencil over the letters so the pencil marks I traced on the back side would show up on the wood. (This was much easier on my hand and of course I didn't think to do it this way until I had about 5 lines left)

After I would get a line all traced with pencil, I went over the outline again with a fine point Sharpie. Then I filled in each letter using a medium point Sharpie. So, after 13 lines of tracing, tracing and filling in, it was complete!

The whole thing took me about 2 weeks to finish. I would work on it whenever I had some spare time. I know people think that you have to have good handwriting to do something like this, but you really don't. You just have to have good tracing skills! Find a font you like and give yourself time and patience to do it right!

I hope this inspires some of you to try something you like, even if you don't think you have the right skills for it. Sure my lines aren't perfectly straight or all the letters spaced even, but I love how it turned out! If you decide to give something like this a try, be sure to show me how it turns out!