Awesome! Now what? Well, I do all sorts of crafts...basically anything Hobby Lobby carries, I practice or have at least tried to do.
This weekend I have had an idea rattling around in my head for a few weeks. I love the signs for the bathroom that are whimsical and meant to look like they're vintage. So having the supplies to do it myself, I did! I think it came out great, and hopefully will inspire you to make your own in your own style!
Here are the supplies I used. I have the 6X12 Cricut and used the George and Basic Shapes Cartridge's Alphabet. I only have a few cartridges with an alphabet but I really like the style of this one.
I use acrylic paints-I'm a tolepainter at heart, and the burgundy I used was Deep Burgundy by Americana. The others were just White and Black by Delta. The canvas was a 16X20. I used some thicker cardstock to cut the letters out and used photo splits for the larger letters (to stick them to the canvas) and my handy dandy old fashioned Xyron machine with the repositionable cartridge. This worked great!
I cut out 4 1/2" letters for the BATHS 25, then 2" for the "cents" sign. I then cut 1" for the rest. I have the computer software from Cricut that allows you to do multiple sized cuts laid out on the screen then will just cut all, instead of having to reset the page, etc. Huzzah! I put the smaller letters through the Xyron-not perfect, but it got the job done!
I then positioned the letters where I wanted them on the canvas using a ruler-I'm fairly OCD so...if you can eyeball it-awesome!
Ok-totally not sure why that posted sideways...maybe that's an advanced blogger trick...anyway, you get the jist.
I took a big ol' blob of paint-acrylics go pretty far! You won't use an entire bottle even if you want to go totally solid on the background. I did NOT paint the background white...I left it naked canvas. I then CAREFULLY painted the burgundy around the letters.
Ok-this is a lot like the stenciling we ALL had in our kitchens and bathrooms in the early to mid 90's...don't even pretend you didn't live in a house that didn't have some form of hearts/ivy/cherubs bordering at least one ceiling in your house...probably in mauve, burgundy or blue. Uh huh...I thought so! I personally had burgundy hearts/ivy in my kitchen and stars/moons "stamped" in the kid's bathrooms. Oh yeah-I rocked it.
Get the color fairly close to what you want, but you can always go in like I did to darken spots after you pull off the lettering and take a good look at it. Here is what mine looked like all painted:
Next, peel off the letters. I actually did it while the paint was still damp. I all of a sudden got paranoid that the paint was somehow going to seal the paper to the canvas and they'd never come off!
Sweeet! That one's sideways too-just what I was going for! You can see in this pic that it's very hard not to get bleed-through under the paper-it is only cardstock...and I always had bleed-through while stenciling too, even with that sticky spray stuff...anyhoo...you can choose how to proceed from here with that. I wanted some pretty crisp lettering, and I have a pretty steady painting hand, so:
I used the pure white and painted in to clean up the edges. Some did take a couple coats, depending on how thick the bleed was. I darkened areas I wanted to and then painted the edge all around in black:
Ooooooooo-like that glow? BAM! Like Bruce Lee baby!
Voila! I was happy with the rustic-ness level I chose. Like I said-you can choose to do a solid background-this will take a LONG time and lots of drying between multiple coats. A fun thought would be to do on a plank of wood-this wouldn't take as many coats to do a solid. Here's what my finished painting looks like! Please share with me your ideas, thoughts and pics! Thanks so much for stopping by!
Ahhhh, sideways ;P
Here's on the wall, though the lighting is awful-next project!!
