insert "cheap & easy" joke here ->

Hi!

 

My name is Cheryl Overton.  I have been sitting here for the last two months watching this date get closer and closer.  I've been doing other stuff too, but mostly sitting here.  Waiting...

Here are two "fun facts" about me:

 

1) I work well under pressure (usually self induced pressure)

2) I love to decorate but I am cheap (my dad calls it frugal and I have come to the scientific conclusion that it is definitely genetically based so I'm not going to fight it)

 

Also, I guess my counting skills could use some help, because upon review, I realize that is three things. 

 

And I also realize they are not all that "fun".

 

So here's some fun stuff.

 

I have two sons - they turned 9 and 11 this summer and in the spring we decided to decorate their bedrooms.  We move a fair bit but have decided to stay in this house for a while so we thought it would be fun to let them pick the themes and help us. 

 

It was then that I realized how few cool decor items there are suited for 9 and 11 year old boys that don't cost your firstborn (although by the end of our little decor experiment, I would have gladly given my secondborn away.  For free.) So I decided to try to decorate their rooms on a very small budget.

 

Lucas, the aforementioned secondborn, was up first.

 

He chose skateboarding. 

 

Well, actually he chose "skateboarding, snowboarding, skiing, soccer, surfing, (after hearing his list I suggested an alliteration room, but he just kind of shook his head and kept talking) and kitten posters (which was the unfortunate result of being set loose at the school book fair with $5 clenched in his hot sweaty little hand, I think he panicked and bought the first thing he saw, which happened to be a pink "hang in there" poster).

 

So we narrowed it down to skateboarding with a touch of surfing and with a few scrapbook papers (digital and paper) and fonts we got to work. 

 

I was the designer but Lucas had final say for each project. 

Here's the first project, which I included a tutorial of sorts for...

materials:

 

• cupboard door
• black spraypaint
• metallic silver spray paint
• piece of photo paper
• PSE 5 (or similar program)
• sanding block (or emery boards if you don't have someone who has tools you can pilfer from)
• adhesive (I used a spray adhesive, but any good quality double sided tape will work, I probably wouldn't suggest tabs because they seem to eventually lose their "stick" on things that hang on the wall)

1.  measure inside of frame to see how large your piece will need to be, I usually print just a touch larger than my opening because sometimes my measure skills are not the greatest
2. my cupboard door happened to be painted black already, but if you want a little bit of black to show through the silver paint, go ahead and spray that puppy black
3. let dry and give a nice thick coat of silver over the black, now here is my first tip that I learned by trial and error (mostly error) metallic spray paint is thicker and needs WAY more time to dry than regular spray paint.  I am not overly patient by nature (see above comment about waiting...) and can not seem to keep myself from touching stuff to see if it's dry.  I was a premature toucher. My paint was not dry.  So I had to do two coats of silver.  Avoid this if possible.
4. go have a coffee and maybe a cookie while it dries, or play a few dozen games of Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook if you like.
5. when it's dry to the touch, take that handy dandy little sanding block (emery board, sandpaper, whatever you have) and sand the edges down until you can see a bit of the black.  Until it makes you happy.
6. have boy choose font
7. after looking at about 253 fonts, help boy by giving him 3 seconds to choose font
8. go ahead and open up that PSE and pick a favourite background paper (I used gradual gradients from Libby Weifenbach)
9. I opened up a blank document that was 8x10 (slightly larger than the hole I wanted to fill on the cupboard door) and dragged the paper into that document
10. then I used a font called Mike Vallely (found here font that makes 9 year olds happy), made it WAY big and let the boy choose which dingbat (heh heh!...... sorry, I spent quite a bit of time with 9 year old boys) he wanted to use, then I dragged it around and positioned it until I liked the placement
11. i then used these fonts -  Aristotle Punk & Rub This! - to create the quote (again with the dragging and the postioning)
12. next I used a brush, I'm not sure which one, but it was probably one that I downloaded for free from this site - misprinted type (they have a ton of very cool large brushes to download)
13. I changed the brush colour to white and randomly weathered my page until I was happy, I mean the boy was happy, with the outcome
14. print on photo paper and cut to size
15. use sanding tool to distress edges of paper and then the adhesive of your choice at adhere paper to cupboard door
16. display in boy's room and enjoy the ravings about what a cool mom you are

 

approximate cost:

$7.00

Of course, if you have the disease that causes you to buy picture frames for no specific reason, you can use the same premise to make other decor items as well. 

Like this one:

I used a skateboard dictionary I found online (thank you Google) and with a few fonts and a frame I picked up at the Walmart for under $20 a couple of years ago made this. (*note - for this project I printed each definition out separately, not all together on one sheet)

And here it is hung up:

And then, well frankly, I was on a bit of a roll.  I had (yet another) frame that needed filling and using a font called logoskate that just about made the boy's eyes roll back in his head from excitement when he saw it, I made this:

 

Here it is all together:

 

And here a closer shot of the little drawer unit thing I picked up at IKEA, we used the logoskate font to make little labels for each of the drawers:

Then the other side of the room needed a bit of attention as well.

I had a bit of plexiglass leftover from a class I taught at a retreat a couple of years ago and using more photo paper, a couple of chipboard pieces that I had and two leftover pieces of black cardstock I had Lucas choose another quote and threw this together to fill up the space on his wall beside the bulletin board:

Lucas considers Tony Hawk a wise, wise man.

Oh! And if you look closely at the corner of the bulletin board, you can see that I also used some heavy duty glue to glue a couple more of those chipboard pieces to thumbtacks to "pretty them up". 

Well, I just realized that this post ended up being about 8 times longer than I thought it was going to be. 

I hope some of you made it through with me!  I'll share our Star Wars bedroom tomorrow and then I promise we'll move on to some other stuff!

Cheryl