Paper Mache Letters

Today project is Paper Mache Letters. I wanted to hang my daughters' names on their wall but at around 5 bucks a letter ( for the wooden ones ) 55 bucks. Hmmmm I can make them for way cheaper :) plus I didn't really care for the fonts , this way I could pick whatever I wanted  . So I got to work.

First I found the font I wanted and blew it up on my laptop screen and just traced the letters I needed on some notebook paper and cut out all my letters .

Then I got out all my old stale cereal and cut open the boxes and traced my letter on to the cardboard 2 of each so I had a front and back to my letters and carefully cut all those out so they matched up . Then I cut out a bunch of 1in wide strips out of my leftover cardboard.

 Now the tricky part. I had to take the strips and tape them to the top and bottom of my letters to create a 3 dimensional letter. Phewww . Once I was done with that ( It took quite awhile and a good bit of tape) it was time to paper mache.

 I didn't have newspaper around but I did have some old phone books :) . The whole thing took some time but you make your paper mache ( flour water and salt )  cut out your strips of paper, dip them in your mixture and smooth of the excess with your fingers and wrap each letter . I didn't have the patience to let them air dry so I put them on a cookie sheet and placed them in a 200 degree oven . It takes about 10-15 on each side for them to be completely dry and you want to make sure they are because moisture trapped inside between the letters can cause mildew and make them fall apart over time. This would be quite depressing with the time that goes into them. I repeated this ( covering in paper mache and baking to dry )  about four times until the were hard and felt comfortable with them . Now these were not perfect their are lots of curves around each letter and their is no way to keep the paper from crinkling over each other in the curves. But I used some fine grain sandpaper and got out what I could with out damaging the integrity of the letters and I was fine with the slight textured look. I didn't take pictures of these steps because it was far to messy :)

Now the fun part :) decorating them . I decided to go with spray paint but anything would be fine ( ohh ohhh ohhh covering them with fabric would be so cute also ). Now at this point I was going to cut out some wallpaper border and put it on the front but I decide to do their fan that way instead and didn't want to go over board with making everything look the same. So I painted them pink and cut out a few of the objects from the wallpaper and hot glued them on.

 Then I took the trim that was at the top of the border and glued it around the edges of every other letter.

The last step was gluing on some ribbon to hang them from. I must say I really like how they turned out but I am so glad this project is finished as it was painstakingly time consuming  .