Monday, August 13, 2012

DIY Abc Poster/Art

So I looked on Pintrest forever looking for the perfect ABC poster. All these cutesy ones for $25-$50. And I almost dropped the cash, but then I remembered that my husband is in Med school=no income.
And I am 9 months pregnant, left my job in Utah, so I'm not making the big bucks either.

So I thought. I painted my giraffe, I can do an ABC poster. But I seriously lost sleep over it.

I was going to just stencil it. Then I hated that, so I didn't finish it all the way. Then I thought about it a few more days and realized it would look good if it were 3D. If I used wooden letters and painted them it would look good. So here I am 9 months prego, thinking I have to get in my hot car (in the garage) and go to Michael's and buy these letters. But I have a lot of CRAP. Like Scrapbooking crap, so I decided to venture through that and found chipboard letters in blue and salmon.

I loved the blue, but didn't have enough to do the whole alphabet in blue, so I checked out to make sure I could craft paint the salmon ones, to make up for the blue ones I didn't have. Two colors not cute enough, so I chose 3, gray green and blue. I have tried to do gender neutral for most of my stuff, but come on, let's get real, if I have a girl I'm going to do more girly colors, and have a butt LOAD of more crafts I want to add to her nursery. But deep down I feel like I'm going to be the person that gets 5 boys before I get a girl.

1. CHIPBOARD LETTERS So let me take you through the steps. I found these chipboard letters that have self-adhesive stickies on the back. But if you are doing this for the first time, you can find chipboard letters at any scrapbook store/craft store. You also could sub them for wooden letters and then MOD Podge them on the canvas.

I paid 1.00 for each box of chipboard letters at a warehouse sale, at some women's conference for these. I collect scrapbook stuff, and for this project it paid off. So there were 84 letters total and I used 26. So if you do the math, it cost me .61 cents for the letters. Good deal.

2. Canvas I bought 3 canvases at DI (goodwill) for $2.00. I realize that is a steal, and you will be lucky to get a canvas for that cheap, but you can get them at a craft store for about 8.00 for 3, then if you use a coupon, around 2.00 each. So the canvas cost me.... .66 cents. Good deal.

3. Paint I bought the yellow paint for multiple projects at Lowe's awhile back, and I just bought a sample size so they are $2.94 each and you use barely any, so probably .50 cents worth to be safe. You also can use craft paint, or any other kind of paint. I just love the yellow paint color I already had. That's the yellow I used to paint the main canvas. Then I had green and gray craft paint for the letters. .59 cents each. So I used barely any of that paint too. So paint, a total of maybe .75 cents that I used. If you are starting out, you can spend like 1.50 on 3 craft paints. ( I didn't have to paint the blue letters). Paintbrush costs about .50 cents at a craft store as well.

So I had to do two or three coats on the salmon letters.




I wrote down what each letter was going to be on a piece of paper, because I didn't want to make ANY mistakes.
And it took me probably a total of one hour to complete the entire project.

Lay all the letters how you want them, then glue/stick as you go. Mine was easy, just a peel off adhesive for the chipboard letters on the back. But Modpodge would work great if you had wooden letters.

I love it, and stay tuned to see it in full motion in Baby M's nursery. :)






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