Spending Freeze Baby Gift

Friends of ours had a baby a few weeks ago and we're going over to meet the new little man this afternoon. While I gave them a gift off the registry prior to the baby's birth, I didn't want to show up empty handed today. Since I'm still on a spending freeze (5 weeks until we get real paychecks again, wahoo!) I needed to get creative. You know I love personalized art, and since the baby's name is Ryan, this is what I came up with. Pretty adorable, right?

I've had this really cute yellow scrapbook paper for a few months now and I've just been waiting for the perfect project to use it. Its double sided, so I used about half of it for this piece and the other half for another project that I'll show you at a later date. Here are the details on it in case anyone's interested. Oh, I think I got it at Micheal's.

 In order to get the perfect initial, I cheated a little by typing "R" into a word document and playing around with the font and size until I found one I liked. I ended up going with the Euphorigenic font in size 600. I then went to the font settings and chose to outline the letter. Once I printed that out, I folded the printed letter over the edges the scrapbook paper and cut the two papers together. I used an exacto knife to cut out the middle of the R.

For the background, I went to my stash of card stock and grabbed gray and white sheets. I measured and cut out one inch strips of the white paper and then glued them onto the gray sheet. Instant stripes! If only painting stripes was that easy! (See where I've painted stripes here and here)

Of course, the next step is to use the glue stick to secure the R onto the newly striped background and pop the whole thing into a frame. You may think I had to spend money on the frame, but you must not know about my frame cemetery :)

I love the final outcome, and while I fully intend for this to go in the baby's nursery I can see something like this hanging in a photo gallery wall.  Good thing our last initial isn't R so I'm not tempted to keep it!

I hope the parents like it! How could they not, right?

I'm also thinking that this could be nice in my classroom - my brain keeps going to decorating my classroom. I better get in there next week and get to work!
So, did you think I could pull off another free piece of art? What have you created with initials before? Any other frame or scrapbook paper hoarders out there? I can't be the only one!

Thanks for reading,
Kathleen

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