A Fine Establishment

Welllll look who decided to show up. TWO days in a row!

IDK if you happened to notice, but in the last post I started using a real camera. That's right. No iPhone there, friends. You see, my trusty Canon (see what I did there) had been MIA (zing!) for over a year. I started making photo yearbooks a few weeks ago, and I have NO IDEA what I'm going to do when I (eventually) get to 2013. It's going to be an entire yearbook of Instagrammed pictures. No joke. I'm like having anxiety over it already.

But enough about that. For awhile now (like years) I've REALLY been wanting to get one of those framed signs that people make of your last name (or kid's first name) made up of random black and white photos of letters. But those things are EXPENSIVE. I almost sucked it up and bought a Groupon for one on like 8 different occasions. But my cheapness kept getting the best of me.

So then I decided to make my own.

I even bought a nice frame for it on a trip to Ikea! And I actually found a website with free printable photos of letters AND I sorted through 100s of each letter, and narrowed it down to a few of each, and finally picked ONE of each of the 7 letters in "Sherman". I did it! But then it was like 4am and I needed to go to bed.

And then, suddenly, it was like 5+ months later. Oops. So now I don't remember what that awesome free letters website was, but I'd be willing to bet that I found it on Pinterest. :)

But tonight was the night. I found that Ikea Ribba frame and I whipped out my iPhoto album of the 7 photos that I'd already turned black and white, and I did a little bit of math and figured out that each one needed to be 2.6"x2.6" to fit (errr after a few miscalculations and wasted printouts. Math was never my specialty). I'm not sure if I'd recommend this particular frame, btw. I would have preferred it to be a bit shorter and wider so that the photos fit better but that's what you get when you do things on the fly. DO NOT tell my husband that I just admitted that I make rash decisions. Umm... Hi honey! ;)

Here's how that came out:

Next step was to pull my signature lazy person move and flip over the piece of paper inside the frame to get a white background. Except... wait for it... here's my Oh Sh*t! moment:

There were INSTRUCTIONS printed all over the back of that paper! What?! Thinking fast (also not my specialty, but this time that brain of mine *almost* pulled through), I grabbed my bag of scrap fabric and a few rolls of wrapping paper. Chaos ensued:

...Nothing worked. My vision had been for the letters to be against plain white. I actually sat down on the floor at this point, feeling defeated (and overdramatic). That's when I saw it: The pile of my husband's scrubs. At first, I was like:

But thennnn I was like: 

Because guess what color they were, and guess what I'd thrown a pair of into my designated cleaning cloth pile earlier this week (and hadn't used yet)?! That's right. WHITE. SCRUBS:

Now, of course, that added a whole ironing-and-taping step. But hey, sometimes life throws us curve balls. Look, Mom, I ironed!!! ....Yeah, it's really kind of a big deal. I honestly don't know why we even own an iron and ironing board. MAYBE for this exact moment?? ;)

 Aaaand to end a very long story almost-awkwardly quickly, here's the finished product:

Ta-daaa! I threw in a printout of "Established 2009" for a little extra kitsch and because it looked a little weird when it was just the letters centered in the frame all alone. Yeah, that "R" is a little bit higher than the rest of the letters, and therefore driving the OCD in me CRAY-ZAY, but it honestly might be another 5 months before I fix it. True story.