Tabitha’s Encouragement

If you read my post on Thursday, you saw the Encouragements that my daughter, Tabitha, and I made.  Inspired by the book, The Fault in Our Stars, we wanted art with encouraging sayings to hang in our townhouse that we plan to rent out as a furnished executive/vacation rental.  I wanted to share the easy steps with you so you can make your own encouragements if you’d like.  The supplies you’ll need:

• Black paper
• Black frame (we used Ikea’s Ribba frame without its mat)
• White chalk pen (we used this one)
• White graphite paper (like this)

We started by picking a quote that we liked and laying it out in PicMonkey, a free photo editing service.  Once we had our quotes like me wanted them, we printed them out. On our work surface, we layered our papers as follows:

• Black paper first
• White graphite paper (with graphite side down) next
• Printed-out quote on top

We taped them all together with painters tape to keep it from shifting.

Layered black paper, white graphite paper, & printed-out quote.

Then we traced the text with a pencil.  That left the a faint white outline of the text on the black paper.  Using the white chalk marker, we traced over the outline and added details like the stripes in the “CREATE” font & the corner embellishments below.  Lastly, we framed our Encouragements.

Encouragment #1

This one makes me think of my husband, Jimmy.  He’s known for his affection for bacon and has a collection of bacon t-shirts, which say things such as “Make Bacon, Not War,”  “Got Bacon?”, “You had me a Bacon”, etc.  He’s been traveling a lot for work lately, so  I decided to hang this homage to him in our Kitchen instead of hanging it in the townhouse.  It makes me think of him and smile when I see it.

That’s what these Encouragements should do– they should make you giggle or feel less stressed or more encouraged.  I “encourage” you to find a quote that will brighten your day and try out this very easy method of creating art.