F A M I L Y

So here is a little run down of the last three years of my life..... I graduated from school, got a job and my life got REALLY busy. So here I sit in front of my computer once again three years later being blessed with the opportunity to stay at home with my little girls for a few months over the summer before she starts Kindergarten in September. Little miss A had her Kindergarten orientation today, I am so excited as she begins her new venture in to school.

Where has the time gone?

There were many times over the past few years I've thought to myself I should write a blog post about this and that.... and well today I finally found something I think is blog, Pinterest, and Facebook worthy.... for a few reasons.

1. I'm so happy with the outcome.
b. I love my mom.
c. I have time!!! 
4. I want everyone to try this because it's sooooo easy :)

The story behind these canvas' is that about 8 years ago my mom bought 8 canvas' and asked all us kids to paint one so she could hang them nicely on the wall somewhere, needless to say we all did a horrible job and they sat in her storage room downstairs since and I know she was always a little disappointed. This year for her birthday I decided after spending countless hours on Pinterest and having millions of ideas of things to do, that it was time to pull them out (I really should have taken a before photo). 

My inspiration:

http://alittleartsy.blogspot.ca/2011/06/beatles-diy-abbey-road-art.html

http://mypartofspace.tumblr.com/post/24327072579/spray-paint-silhouette-leave 

You'll need.....

- Canvas' (however many you need)
- Paint (I used Martha Stewart paint from Micheals)
- Paint brushes
- One bowl per color
- Children (or yourself, mine was a family project, no pun intended!)
- Mack tack (I found mine at the dollar store)
- Scissors (to cut out letters and mack tack)
- Spray paint (I got mine from Micheals)
- Large plastic sheet (to spray paint over)
- Lots of love and a little patience

~

My project took about three nights, maybe an hour or so a night. 


First night I set up each of the kids with a canvas and some paint. Each kid got ONE color of paint, a brush and a small dab of white paint and clear glitter paint on the side. They were allowed to paint the front of their canvas however they wanted as long as each canvas only had the one color. 

* I will update the blog with a pic of the paint I used, I just can't seem to find my box of paint ANYWHERE!!

~

On the second night that was all my job, I took some time on the computer finding the right fonts for the letters that I wanted. I'll try and break it down for you if your not that handy with computers, I'm sure I'll miss some steps on the way but just comment if you have any questions. 

1.   Open Word
2.   Type out the word family or whatever your wanting, like so: F A M I L Y
3.   Make the word really big where it all fits on the screen.
4.   Highlight one letter at a time and go through the fonts till you find one that you like.
5.   Once you have found a font for each letter, make the letters big enough to fill your computer screen (one letter per page
6.   This is where it can get a little tricky, next I screen printed the screen and pasted it into paint.
7.   Then I used the dotted line square and highlighted around just the letter and cut it from the page.
8.   Now I opened powerpoint and copied the pic to a blank page (this is because the canvas is square so I wanted to be able to stretch the letter out to fit the whole 8" square).
9.   Once I figured out how big the letter needed to be (took me two times of printing the "F" to figure it out), I did that for each of the letters individually.
10. Then I cut each letter out.

* On a side note I'm sure you could use a kricket to cut out your letters, I just didn't have one and am pretty good messing around my computer to get the results i am looking for.

 ~

The third night was pretty fun! I got to trace out each letter onto the mack tack, cut the letters out of the mack tack, stick the letters to the canvas and then I got to do some spray painting!!! 

* when tracing the letters onto the mack tack MAKE SURE you copy the letters backwards so that when you put the sticky side down the letter is mirrored (the right way).

I only allowed the spray paint to dry for about 10 minutes before I took the mack tack off. They have amazingly clean lines, there was one spot of the "a" that I seems to have missed pressing the edges enough and I think a little on the "m". 

So that's it folks it's super easy, you could do a child's name, your fmaily name, any word you so desire and the best part is that it is all custom to what you want. I hope you half even half as much joy as I did seeing my finished project!!!

As always feeling blessed.

N