Smile!

Sourced here

I first saw this "smile" artwork on Emily Henderson's blog (here), and immediately loved it. So when I was gazing at my nowhere-near-complete frame gallery in my office and wondering what else I could use to fill those frames, it came back to mind.

It's available for sale in all its metallic foil blocked glory from the Keep Calm Gallery for 35 pounds plus postage, which is pretty reasonable for something that's handmade. But I'm both impatient and cheap, so I decided to have a shot at making my own version.

I searched Spotlight for some gold foil, but found this ultra-sparkly gold cardboard instead for the grand price of about $2.00.

I decided which frame would become my smiley frame...

And then measured the size of the space inside the frame. I then created a square the same size on my computer, and experimented with fonts and sizing, until I was happy.

I decided on the font Kartika (available for free download here) at 240pts.

Then I printed it and carefully cut out the letters.

Just as well I'm not dyslexic!

I then cut little pieces of sticky tape...

Which I then doubled over and stuck onto the front side of each letter (important that it's the front).

I then stuck each letter face downwards onto the back side of my gold cardboard, and then carefully cut around the edges of each letter.

Then I just peeled away the original printed letters from the back of the cardboard...

And then repeated my sticky tape doubling-over procedure, this time directly onto the back of each cardboard letter. I decided to go with sticky tape rather than the more permanent option of glue, just to prevent things from getting messy. I'm still a bit too rusty with my crafting skills to be confident that I wouldn't get glue everywhere and have to start again.

I pulled out a ruler and a plain piece of white paper, and measured so that each letter would be centred both vertically and horizontally in the paper.

I kept the ruler beneath each letter as I stuck them on, so that their bottoms would line up nicely.

Until they were all stuck in place!

I popped the paper back into the frame behind the glass, and voila! A constant reminder to grin!

It sits right above my other reminder to grin... the photo of my baby when she was a nine-week-old puppy.

And it plays very nicely with my new curtains!

You actually got a sneak peek of my little smile art when I showed off my new office curtains. Couldn't get this in quite fast enough!

That's one frame down, but still quite a few more empty or missing! I'll get there soon.