Here's Your Sign

I hate crafts. I've always hated crafts. They make me sticky, or they don't turn out as planned, or they take too long. 
When I start something, I want to finish it in one sitting. That's how I wrote my papers in college. That's how I build this blog. That's my flow. If I walk away, the return percent decreases by a half life every fifteen minutes. 
In high school, I used to scrapbook. But I followed the same rules, and I completed every album in less than an afternoon. 


Needless to say, I haven't attempted anything crafty in quite some time. 


However, Nick has been on surgery recovery all week and I am officially on summer vacation. We caught up on sleep, cleaning, laundry and grocery shopping in about two days, and since, the urge to 'make something' overwhelmed me. 


And not just any 'something'. I wanted to make canvas art for our home. Here are my first two attempts:


Attempt #1 is a 11x16 canvas wrap. It is the signature lyrical phrase from our wedding song. I created the lettering with stick-on 2" lettering (3" for the 'kiss me' part) and then Design Master spray paint - a combination between blueberry and a royal blue. It dried in less than five minutes, and I pealed the letter off of the canvas.

When I'm out of my comfort zone, I make every effort to follow societal norms so as not to illuminate my novice. I, therefore, attacked this particular project without any sort of planning or measuring so as to foster my spontaneous artistic muse. That's what artists do, right? My lovely, medically-stoned, engineer of a husband kindly pointed out that failure to plan, sketch, measure and level results in crooked lettering. While I rebutted his claims and criticize him back for being too structured, I was simultaneously irked by the crooked lettering brought on by my failure to incorporate planful tendencies. So for Attempt #2, he helped me...
This time, I used a 16 x 16 canvas. I drew 2" lines with a straight edge and plotted out the message before I started to stick the lettering to the canvas. I hand-painted the canvas over the lettering with a cloudy blue acrylic paint. And let everything dry in the sun for approximately 2 hours before I peeled off the lettering. 

I far from love my two projects, but for someone who was going to outsource my future children's craft days to my crafty friends or local youth bureau afternoons, I think these two signs aren't terribly bad. Good enough to share on pinterest, at least :)