Friday, April 13, 2012

Nursery alphabet wall

Like oh-so-many of my plans, the decoration of the nursery got quickly derailed. As they say, the path to hell is paved with good intentions. My pathway has very many pavers, indeed! I am fo' sho' an idea person. I am less good with follow-through. Love me, love my half-finished everything.

Anyways, the nursery.

One major part of my idea for the nursery was an alphabet wall. I am cheap, though, and paying for individual letters did not appeal to me. When Jo-Ann's had a big sale on scrapbooking paper in January, I stockpiled about 35 pieces of 12x12 paper in a wide variety of patterns and colors. I had this vague idea that I could print out the alphabet in a big font, and use them as stencils. I wanted the letters to have a little depth, so I decided to use foam board to make them slightly 3D (ok, M told me that was the best way). One day, in a fit of motivation, I determined what order I wanted the papers to go in, and labelled them.

And there I stopped. I still had to decide on a font, print out the letters, cut out the letters, somehow adhere them to the foamboard, cut the foamboard, determine the spacing, and hang them on the wall.

And then my brother visited. He decided on a font and a size for me. I tried printing them but evidently I need to re-install the printer driver (or maybe just that update my computer keeps bugging me about?), so M printed them out. Then my in-laws visited. And somehow, this happened:


Yes, that would be my dear husband and his father cutting out letters. After much deliberation, they decided to cut the letters out of the paper first, then glue them to the foam board, then cut them out of the foam board.


This is the letter-gluing process. M used his engineering skillz to fit all the letters (and an ampersand!) onto one and a half sheets of foam board, leaving me with two spare sheets and a new board on Pinterest.


This was my view from the chair-and-a-half. I was nursing Charlotte. That was my excuse for not helping. That, and cooking dinner.

Let's recap. Thus far, I have managed to not actually do more than one or two steps of the entire process. I'm hoping to successfully complete the entire project by only personally completing three steps. Here is my third step:



Please excuse the very strange lighting. Charlotte's nursery is doubling as my seed-starting room for now; the grow light is illuminating the leftmost letters. And is it me, or is the S upside down?

Hopefully I can convince M to hang the letters this weekend. I will feign incompetence and a general inability to hang things in a straight line. Do not speak of my devious plans!

2 comments :

  1. so cute! i want to do an alphabet wall when we finally get around to finishing natalie's playroom (somedayyyy), but the thought of paying for all of the letters didn't appeal to me, either. love the foam board idea!

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  2. As you can imagine, I love your process. The letters look amazing -- can't wait to see them on the wall. And you're right, the S is def upside down!

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