for father's day

I've been keeping an ever-growing stack of Adelaide's abstract art for a long time now, waiting for an idea to make something of them. Finally, I was inspired with Father's Day coming up, and so this morning Adelaide and I spent some time together making up some gifts for her Daddy and Grandpa.

To make our Father's Day signs, I printed out the words in Adobe Illustrator (but you could use any program with type), and outlined them in a thin .25 pt line. I printed them out onto sheets of heavy watercolour paper cut down to 8.5 x 15" in size. The typeface I used is called Mrs. Eaves.

Or, if you would like, (and don't mind the way we spelled Granpa) you are welcome to use our templates and size them as you need. You may download them here:

http://lovelydesign.com/downloads/granpa_template.pdf

http://lovelydesign.com/downloads/daddy_template.pdf

When I had some time without Adelaide around, I used a new, sharp exacto blade and cutting mat to cut out the letters. (After ruining too many projects, I now buy exacto blades in bulk and change my blades often). I cut out each letter just on the outside of each line, so that the line would no longer show when the letter was removed. I wasn't too worried about staying perfect and close to the outline, but rather I tried to keep my wrist from tightening up, pivoted the paper beneath the blade as needed. When each letter was cut out, I kept all the pieces in a small box - perhaps the letters can be used for a later projects, and also I didn't want to lose the cut out middle pieces from the letters such as "D".

This morning, together Adelaide and I then went through her stack of artwork. We selected several pages in all colours which had some nice markings on them, and in a variety of mediums - collage, watercolour, crayon, marker, pastel. Then we used the cut out sign as a window to find nice framing for each letter. We also made the words into a rainbow using the appropriate colours.

Adelaide really enjoyed sticking a few pieces of masking tape to the backs of the cut artworks, and then laying the word-frame on top of the art, and patting it down to make it stick. Then we would flip it all over, and tape down it all down securely. When all was secure, I glued another sheet of watercolour paper to the back, rolled it with a brayer, and pressed it underneath some heavy books to set.

Adelaide is really pleased with the results of our collaboration. She is very proud of them and wants to give her daddy her gift right now! She is also usually camera-shy, but she even wanted to be photographed with them!