Maker of the House

I promised myself I would post more often and try to catch up with all the stuff I’ve been doing…but I don’t have to explain to all of you guys how hard that is with a toddler around! This past week has been extra busy because we hosted our friends’ son for what we ended up calling “Camp Atlanta.” He stayed with us for a week, and Evan and I took him to all our favorite places and at least one new one…Atlanta peeps check out the Tellus Museum. Both Evan (19 months) and Landon (7 years) had a complete blast playing with all the hands-on exhibits and it was clearly the favorite favorite of all the things we did. We will definitely head back there on a regular basis.

Here’s a fun and really easy craft project to personalize your kid’s room.  This is a great idea for a homemade birthday or Christmas present and depending on what materials you already have, can be quite inexpensive.  I wish I had more pictures because I’ve done quite a few of these now, but here is the latest one.  I made this one for Maya, Evan’s special baby friend.  She is two months older than him and it has been so fun watching Evan and Maya grow up together.  Her parents are planning a hot air balloon theme for her room.  So I made this for her.  It was supposed to be a first birthday present but became a celebrating becoming a big sister present….congratulations Maya on your new baby sister!  Here is a picture of her name sign….see below if you want to make one yourself.

Materials Needed (all available at just about any craft store or online)

• unfinished wooden plaque with metal hangers on the back (buy these separately if needed)
• unfinished wooden letters
• tacky glue used for gluing wood (that’s what I used…hot glue would be good too)
• acrylic paint in various colors and brushes
• unfinished wooden accents (optional, I didn’t add any to this particular one, but you can get all sorts of cute shapes…I’m making a train sign for Evan)

Steps for putting it all together:

1. Decide placement for all your parts by putting them together before you glue anything.  For all my signs, I put the letters for the name to one side and left a blank area for the picture or accents.  Depending on the length of your name, and spacing of the letters you will have more or less room for your pictures/accents.
2. Roughly sketch out your design on paper the same size as your sign for reference purposes.  Keep it simple!  For this theme, I needed pictures of hot air balloons to help me draw.  I just googled “hot air balloon” on google images and got plenty of help.  I’ve also found that googling your theme with the words “cartoon” or “art” will help you find simplified images or ideas if you find it too intimidating to turn a photograph of the real thing into a simple image for your sign.
3. Before gluing, paint the base of your sign, your letters and any accents separately.  If you try to glue first and then paint, it will be much more difficult and you could end up with brush-stroke lines around the letters.  If you are mixing up your own colors, make sure you have enough to cover the areas you want before you start painting.  It is very hard to recreate the exact same color if you don’t have enough.  Let paint dry.
4. Place the letters and accents on the sign where you want them and then picking them up one at a time, add glue and stick them on.  Let glue dry.  (Note:  for this step, make sure everything is placed correctly so that the hangers on the back of the sign are on the top edge of the sign…I learned this the hard way, accidentally making this sign “upside down” so that it was necessary to remove the hangers on the back and replace them in the correct spot.
5. Very lightly sketch your theme image (if you are painting it) in pencil on your sign if you need a reference for painting.  In my experience, it is hard to erase pencil lines on acrylic so it is useful to have a bit of extra base color to cover mistakes, if you make any, or you can just paint over them with a little bit of an accent color.
6. Paint your image, let dry and you are done!

Here’s a close-up of the theme image for this sign…I’m horrible at painting people, so I chose bunny rabbits as my balloon riders!  How do you like it?