Saturday, November 7, 2009

Rainy Day Paint Project

Recently, one of my dear Grandmothers had a series of unfortunate events that has landed her kitchenless for the last month. Long story short, she's getting some new stuff, and I'm helping her revamp her walls...NOT an easy task. But, that's a blog for another day. ANYway, while prepping her walls and taking things down, I managed to accidentally break the letter sorter that she has had for umpteen years. She wasn't too hurt by it, decided it could easily be fixed, and left it at that. Of course, I felt bad and had to figure some way to make it up to her. I thought I'd go to Ross and pick one up for cheap, but then I remembered that I actually had one at home! I had picked up an old one at Goodwill one day thinking I would repaint it and use it. I never found the time or motivation to do so and planned on re-donating it back to Goodwill on my next trip. As soon as I found a chance, I pulled it out and started brainstorming.

First, I shabbily painted it with a light green paint. Then, it sat on the counter for a couple of weeks while I spent a handful of hours of "research" on the computer. When I finally figured out what I was going to do, I went to www.letteringdelights.com to find a font that I could copy. I copied several fonts to my photo-editing software, sized them appropriately, and printed them out. Then, I cut out the words, scribbled pencil all over the back, then traced over the front onto the letter sorter so that I would have an exact copy to paint over. It worked perfectly. Unfortunately, I did quite a few re-paintings as I couldn't decide on the right font and color. OH, and I used an old stencil that I had to make a cool background before tracing a painting the words. After that was all finished, I spent a good hour or two perfecting it. It turned out way better than I originally imagined.

I'm sure she'll like it, as it was made with love =) I haven't given it to her yet...so if you're reading this blog Grandma...SURPRISE!

Took a "before" pic shortly after I started painting.


"After"

Close-up

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fantastic! When are you coming down here to help me out? Jessica

Suzi said...

Wow Girl, that is REALLY great! When are you going to start selling them?
I've got some more things here you can paint that I got when we went to Goodwill. If you ever get a hankerin, let me know you can have a shelf or something.