I love giving personalized/handmade gifts. This year for Christmas I was kind of struggling for an easy/inexpensive personalized gift to give to my boyfriend. He’d been looking for good pocket notebooks to carry around with him to jot down ideas, so I found these small Moleskine notebooks at Target I knew would be perfect. Now, I knew he would appreciate these just as is, but me being me, I decided I needed to take them up a notch. I decorated these notebooks with short quotes from a few of our favorite nerdy TV shows, but you could use any quotes or phrases!
Supplies:
+ notebooks
+ pencil
+ ruler
+ acrylic paint
+ paint brush
+ a good eraser!
First, come up with your quotes. I chose really short phrases so I could have one word per line. Once you have your phrase chosen, measure the height of your journal, or space you want the quote to take up vertically, and divide that by the number of words in your phrase. Use a pencil to draw lines to use as guides, you can erase these later.
Next, figure out how wide your letters need to be, and draw lines for those. If you have all really short words, like this Firefly quote, you can just choose a width you think looks nice, and mark it out. If you have longer words, like I had in my X-Files quote, divide the width of the journal, or width you want your word to take up horizontally, by the number of letters in your longest word. Make that the measurement for the width of every letter in your phrase. Once you have your measurements, create a grid using pencil. When you paint on your phrase, make each letter fill its space on the grid completely. I used tan acrylic paint I had left over from the Antler Tip Necklaces I’d recently made.
Once your paint has dried completely, you can just go over the whole thing with your eraser to get rid of all the pencil! If you have a light color like I did, you may end up needing to touch up a few places where the pencil shows through the paint.
I hope these directions aren’t too confusing! I wasn’t initially planning on posting these, so I didn’t take pics through my process, but I’m confident you can figure it out! Or you could always just wing it! ;]
// Laura Jude //
