DIY: Thrift Art into Quote Art

I did a craft! It's been so long! It was a Pinterest find, of course. The inspiration came from two posts, one from A Beautiful Mess HERE and another from Southern Belle Soul HERE.

Basically, the project is this: use an old/found/thrifted/whatever piece of art and with a little reverse-stenciling and some craft paint, create a cool new thing to hang on your wall, personalized with a favorite quote or lyric.

Here you can see the original art and the stickers I put into place:

You can also see that I still have a Christmas tablecloth on my kitchen table. I can feel you judging me. I used some regular scrapbooking stickers, a decision which would come back to haunt me. I also had only one "y" in the set I wanted to use, but I was undeterred. Here's the thing about me and crafts. When I get an idea in my head, I just want to do it. Immediately. I don't want to wait until the next day to go to the craft store and get all the appropriate supplies. I just force what I have on hand to work. It causes trouble. Do you think I measured and drew lines to keep the stickers straight? If so, you don't know me very well. Eyeballed it!

Next step: time to paint! I used an off-white acrylic craft paint that was probably AT LEAST ten years old. And while it technically still worked, it was veeeerrryyy thin, which meant I had to do many layers to get some decent coverage. Do you think I waited until each layer was completely dry before adding another? Of course not! While I initially intended to cover it completely, I ended up liking the slight translucence and the way the brush strokes were visible, so I stopped here. You can see that I left a hole where I planned to just peel off the "y" from "you" and reuse it for the end of "may." Sounded like a good idea at the time.

Okay, now comes the step for which there are no pictures because it involved a solid hour of picking, scraping, and peeling the letter stickers off the painting. I'm not sure exactly where I went wrong, but I have a few ideas, should you decide you too want to attempt this project. 

First, get better, thicker letter stickers. In the tutorials I linked to above, both used what appear to be some vinyl letter stickers. But that would've required me to wait until tomorrow and drive all the way to the craft store to pick some up, and I think we've established that wasn't going to happen. So my little paper letter stickers got so saturated with paint that the paper layer peeled right off and left the sticky layer behind. Cue lots of scraping with a rubber-ended cuticle stick. 

Second, use better, thicker, less-than-a-decade-old paint. Then you will only need one layer, maybe two, and your stickers, paper or otherwise, will not become saturated.

Third and final idea, let the paint dry all the way before removing stickers. I know, I know. That should be common sense. See above for reminders about my impatience.

So after I had finally scraped all the stickers off, I used a teeny tiny paintbrush to carefully clean up a few of the rough edges on some of the letters. I also sort-of eyeballed the second "y" with the help of a "v," since the original "y"(like all the stickers) had not peeled up easily but rather was picked off in several small non-reusable pieces. 

And after ALL that, I stood back and... actually... liked it! See for yourself:

All in all, not too bad for a $2 Goodwill painting and supplies I already had laying around the house. I would definitely make more of these, but will try to get the better stickers next time, which I think will make a huge difference. I would love to do one for Huddy's room (already have a quote in mind) and this could also make a simple baby shower or wedding gift. 

This quote, by the way, is a lyric from Moulin Rouge - fittingly romantic as I plan to hang this in our bedroom!