Wall quote for pennies!

I'm so proud of myself! I managed to get a look I wanted for pennies! 250 pennies to be exact!



Everywhere I look lately there are those wall quotes popping up. I've seen them on websites, blogs, ebay, etsy, magazines .... everywhere. They look so cool but they are also fairly expensive. I wanted an inspirational quote to break up a big stair wall, but for the size I wanted it wasn't really do-able with my current spending ban. The more I thought about it though, the more I thought, "I could totally do that myself". How? I wasn't quite sure, but where there's a will there's a way!

I wanted it to be brown to go with the colours of my upstairs hall which is done in shades of creams and golds and I wanted it to be inspirational and fun but above all I wanted it to be free or as close to free as I could get it....

I used to watch a kids show when I was little called 'Blue Peter' and they were always making things from nothing and mostly they used what's known here as 'sticky back plastic', nowadays it's called self adhesive vinyl and I think that's what they use for the commercial quotes. Probably an upmarket specialist vinyl, but still.... Soooo, I forked out £2.50 for 10 sheets of A4 brown sticky vinyl and got to thinking how to go about my quote.

I found that the trick lies in mirroring the text, after that it's just a steady hand and lots of snipping. I typed up my quote in Word (I used a font size of about 350 I think), put a bit of fancy font in, mirrored it, printed onto the reverse of the vinyl and got to cutting. And cutting and cutting and cutting.....

Those little thin bits of font were a nightmare to snip round, but not so much a nightmare as trying to get it onto the wall and evened up! Each individual letter, comma and squiggle was cut out one at a time. Trying to get the backing paper off of those fiddly little dots for the letter 'i' in the words ability and choices....OH MY! Finally though I was done and I'm so proud of what I ended up with. It's about 3 feet high by 3 feet wide and looking at the prices for that size I saved myself a ton of money! Plus, I got it exactly how I pictured it in my mind, it would have been tricky finding just that quote in just that size and just that layout.

I tried to get the lines coming down at the same angle as the stairs and I think it all worked out great, even if I do say so myself! It's a thing of beauty and brings me joy :D