Printable Letter Art

A new edition of the Pinterest challenge has brought me out of blog hibernation. The Pinterest challenge was dreamed up by Sherry at Young House Love and Katie at Bower Power, and this challenge is also hosted by Erin at the Great Indoors and Cassie at Hi Sugarplum. You can head over to any of their blogs to see all the fun Pinterest inspired projects that people are doing. I had so much fun with the last two challenges, that I was determined to try it again, despite the fact that I haven't had a free weekend in a few weeks. I pulled this together last night. I pinned this two or three months ago, because I thought it was a great idea for affordable, personal art to hang on your walls.

Source: fullofgreatideas.blogspot.com via Sarah on Pinterest

The idea came from the blog Full of Great Ideas, but the thing that made this a really fun and easy project was this image collection from Leo Reynolds. He has created collections with 100s of images of each letter of the alphabet (and numbers, too) that you can use for non-commercial purposes. To personalize this even more, you could take your own letter pictures, like Matushka Anna.

Last night, I stopped at Michaels, coupon in hand, and bought a frame. Then I had fun taking a look at all the options for the letters in my last name. I tried to keep the first rule of cataloging in mind as I did so. (Do not agonize.) I wanted a somewhat colorful collection with various styles of letters. I really like the results, and it was pretty quick and easy to do. I saved the images in the large size, since I wanted the printouts to be high quality. I cropped them to fit my frame, and then I just pasted them into a Word document to print them out. I printed a test sheet in grayscale fast quality to make sure the images would work with my frame. Once I was sure my images were the right size, I printed them on plain old printer paper, but I used the high quality print setting.

Once they were all printed, I cut them out, taped them to the mat, et voilà! I'm lucky, since it's pretty easy to find a frame with 6 slots. If you have a 3 or 4 letter last name, you'll have lots of options. If you're not so lucky to find a frame with the correct number of slots, you could have a mat custom cut, or design an image that doesn't need a mat. I'm really pleased with the way this turned out, and it's fun to know I can change up the letters any time I want. I plan to hang it in our entryway. I have a few ideas for dressing up that area, and now I'm excited to get going on it, so I can hang my new picture.