So Blessed.

Last week I had a 6 hour training day at work. We do this a couple of times a year. Considering that I've been working at the same place since 2007, this was my 7th repeat of this same training (with minor tweaks). Needless to say, my favorite coworker and I were bored out of our minds and at some point ended up playing with our phones. That's when she stumbled upon this:

Unfortunately, I have no idea where she found it. It links to the url she sent me, but if anyone knows where it's originally from, PLEASE lemme know. I was instantly obsessed. I dragged E to Michael's that afternoon (which is like an hour-long subway ride, mind you. We're in the heart of Brooklyn and Michael's is on like 98th and Lexington in Manhattan). But... when we got there, my big plans sort of came crashing down around me when I saw how expensive the faux flowers were. Not to mention the price of wooden letters. Feeling defeated, I moped around the store for about a half an hour before stumbling on some glittery gold paper/card stock in the scrap booking department and fell in love. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but I bought three sheets.

When I got home, I decided that I was going to cut out letters from it. I debated between a bunch of words... "Home", "Hello", "Breathe", "Howdy", "Sweet", "Lucky", "Adore", etc. I even texte the options to E on multiple occasions while he was at work, but he never responded. Oh well. Eventually I decided on "Blessed"- because, really, we are. I get caught up in the kids things that we don't have, but aside from that, we really do have it good and I could really use a reminder of that.

Here's the finished product, followed by the process:

After selecting a word, I needed to figure out a font. I browsed Pinterest a couple of times before narrowing it down to two: "You Found Me" and one called "LSTK Clarendon" (bold).

 

vs.

Honestly, I normally would've gone with the 2nd option, but I was really craving a hand-written look and ended up going with the 1st. I do want to use the 2nd one for another project though....

Now, there might be a quicker, more efficient way of doing this, but this was my method. First, I blew up the font to size 450 and printed it out lengthwise on paper, like so:

Then I cut out each letter with scissors:

Next, I traced it all, backwards, onto the back of my glitter paper:

And cut it all out with an exacto knife:

Here it is looking a bit like Arabic, haha:

Once it was all cut out and flipped over, it made a lot more sense:

Then I just taped each letter in place, and voila!

 Let's just agree to ignore how badly I need a second coat of paint on those poor walls. I'm really pleased with the results though! As for that first project, should I check eBay for faux flowers? Craigslist? Anyone know of somewhere to buy fake flowers on the cheap? I want to maybe create one for the guest room...