I am excited to write about one of my first craft projects! When I was fixing up Kaitlyn's room, I really wanted some nursery letters spelling out her name on the wall. But the only letters I really liked were the wooden ones from PB Kids, and I was too cheap to pay $10/letter. Michael's had wooden letters for about $3/letter, but I didn't like the font. With not a lot of other options, I decided to channel my inner Martha Stewart and do it myself!
Since I don't have one of those jigsaw wood cutters, I thought about cutting out some cardboard and painting them, but then I got inspired by a piece of flat styrofoam I found among all our packaging materials in the garage. I bought a new clean piece at Michael's and got to work. I didn't really know what I was doing so made the steps up along the way - at least I took a few photos to document the process!
Step 1: In MS Word, type out the letters you need in your desired font. Increase the font size to 750, so there's one letter on each page. Print out and using scissors, cut each letter out.
Step 2: Attach letters to the styrofoam piece (I used push pins) and with a pen, trace each letter out.
Step 3: Using a styrofoam cutter, carefully follow the pen lines and cut out each letter. I didn't even know styrofoam cutters existed but after some googling on how to cut styrofoam I discovered I could buy one at Michael's for twenty bucks. It was so easy and actually fun to use.
Step 4: Cover the letters with paper mache. Since the styrofoam is porous, it would have been really hard to paint the letters, so I had to figure out a way to coat them so they could easily be painted. I used scraps of tissue paper and Mod Podge (thinned out with water) and covered each letter with two coats. This was the most grueling, time-consuming part of the project and it took me a whole week to get all the letters completely covered. The tissue kept sticking to my fingers instead of to the styrofoam, and it was so hard to get it to stick to those little corners and curves. Also I had to wait overnight for the glue to dry in between coats. In the end though, after everything had dried, I had some solid pieces of paper mache'd styrofoam ready to be painted.
Step 6: Paint the letters. Easy and fun. I used acrylic paint in an ivory color. The project could have easily just ended here. But then I decided that just ivory was too plain and wanted to add to it even more.
Step 7: Decorate. I stenciled each letter on the back of a piece of scrapbook paper, then cut the paper out and glued it onto the letters.
The whole project from start to finish probably took me about 3 weeks, but that's because I also had my hands full with Kaitlyn and could only work on it in small pieces at a time. If I had all the free time in the world I probably could have finished it in 2 days. Here is a cost breakdown and how it compares to $70 for PB Kids letters:
Styrofoam piece: $5
Styrofoam cutter*: $12 ($20 with 40% coupon from Michael's!)
Bottle of mod podge: $5
Acrylic paint: $2
Foam/paint brushes: $3
Scrapbook paper: $0 (leftover from another project)
Total cost: $27
For under $30, I can't complain and I'm very pleased with the result. Here it is in action:
I guess I have been productive during my maternity leave. And there you have it. DIY nursery letters!
* Not counting the second styrofoam cutter I bought because I got too excited with the first one and broke it after the first use. Including the second cutter, the total project cost was actually $39.
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