Week 1 - Making What You Have Work - Metal Letters

This is week 1, year 2 of my blog.  I am going to post weekly of what I accomplished during the week.  It seems like I had difficulty getting in a daily post last year.  I may do multiple posts on the same day so I can categorize them.

Making What You Have Work

I knew I wanted to spell out a quote for a project.  It needed to fit in my grunge theme and it needed to fit on a limited space.  I started digging through my supplies to try and see what worked.  I will tell you that it makes it easier when you get all like items in the same place so that you can see what you have.  I have a tendency to forget about things until after a project is already done.

I tried chipboard letters but they were too big and I didn't really want to go paper for this project. I settled on the fact that I wanted to use metal letters so I started digging.  Yes I found two sets of metal letters that were ok, but not exactly what I wanted so I decided to alter them.  The awesome thing is they have been neglected in my stash for ever.  A friend gave me the block ones about 4 or 5 years ago for free because she didn't want them.  The tag ones I got in a value pack of metals from Joanns in 2007 for $10 when I went to Massachusettes to visit my grandma.

This is the before shot of what they looked like (no laughing - this is just a happy coincidence that I pulled these two out):

My problem is that are the silver color.  Not very grungy and the tags were too big to spell out the quote in the defined area.  So I started with the bigger letters and began to grunge them out. I started with a coat of gesso before I applied rust alcohol ink. 

The next step is I grunged up some small pieces of white core cards stock by sanding it.  Then I layered it behind the letters.  Great way to use scraps as it doesn't take much paper.  After that. I coated random edges with a versa mark pad and used black embossing powder.  It made a difference of really making the letters stand out. (This was a technique I learned from CoyoteKim).

For the tags, I cut them down to size just using regular scissors.  I wanted them to vary a little so I made sure that I wasn't precise in cutting them down.  The were so tiny after I cut them out, I knew it would be a nightmare to work with them.  So I decided to put down strips of the double sided tacky tape on a piece of scrap paper.  Then I arranged my title.  Inked the letters.  I did not gesso these as I didn't want them as dark so I just applied rust alcohol ink. I then cut out the words separately.  It made it so much easier to adhere to the project.

Finished quote: Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. - Pablo Picasso.  (Yep that is magic mesh underneath the quote.  I have tons of that stuff)