Oh, Mr. Darcy

It took me a good many years to jump on the Pride and Prejudice bandwagon. I think I even saw the movie first. And not even the Colin Firth one. The Matthew Macfadyen one. I've never seen the Colin Firth one, actually. Actually, the only other film I've seen is Bride & Prejudice, the Bollywood interpretation. That one is fabulous, for the record. I love Bollywood!!

But, yeah. I got the Barnes & Noble "leatherbound classics" edition of seven Jane Austen novels (link) for Christmas a couple years ago. First - can we all rejoice in the beauty that is B&N leatherbound classics? We own at least 10-20 of those bad boys, and I want them all. All of them! They're gorgeous books. GORGEOUS. That was the first time I ever read P&P but I loved it! I also read Sense and Sensibility and enjoyed it. I started on Mansfield Park and it was too much for me. That style of writing is difficult, the family is awful, and it's obvious the cousins are going to fall in love which is just...ew. And it's much longer than the other two. So I've taken a break from Jane Austen until I decide if I'm just going to skip over that one or suffer through it. Oh, side note - don't waste your time with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That book is just dreadful. Brilliant concept, terrible execution. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, on the other hand is glorious.

Holy smokes, I'm off topic. Are you surprised? THEN YOU DON'T KNOW ME AT ALL.

The ladies from our small group at church had a "Pinterest Party" last weekend. We all brought recipes we'd found on Pinterest (I made frozen hot chocolate and peanut butter fruit dip and they were delicious.) and attempted to recreate this pin:

source

I've gone to Facebook and stolen all their pictures of their completed stuff. I got ones without faces in them, at least. Anyway, here are the final results:

She is an art teacher.

She prays this verse over her daughter every night.

Her husband got fancy in a word editor. 8P
This was everyone's favorite by far.

This is going into a Dr. Seuss-themed nursery.

I'm  saving mine for last because everyone loves me the most. Anyway, the art teacher's husband has a printer-type thing that creates vinyl stickers, so we gave her the text we wanted and she had him print it off. Everyone did it kind of differently, but basically you set it up how you want the letters to look, put stickers over it, then set it up how you want everything around the letters to look, and then peel the stickers off.

Everyone did basic painting, except for me. I MOD PODGED! Going back to my weird Pride and Prejudice rant that up until this point has made no sense in the context of this post... I made a Mr. Darcy quote. If you've read P&P, you'll probably know exactly the one I used. Also, if you remember me mentioning P&P&Z...well, we had a copy of that book, which sucks. And the only copy of P&P we have is in my super sexy B&N leatherbound edition...so the pages I Mod Podged were from Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. 8} I didn't look too closely at which pages I pulled - I just got ones that had full text from top to bottom and no chapter numbers or blank space at the end of a chapter in them. I also used the picture where Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy are standing in the middle of a cabbage patch full of zombies that are eating cabbage because they thought it was brains. That book is so weird. And don't let those last two sentences make you think you want to read it, because - trust me - it sucks.

So, yeah. I Mod Podged the paper down, put stickers on it, painted over it yellow, and pulled the stickers off. Some things to do differently:

1. Make sure you cover the paper completely with Mod Podge before putting the stickers down. They peel off super easy, as long as they're not on non-Mod-Podged paper. There were a few that were directly on the paper, and it just peeled off with the sticker. Super lame.
2. If you use a light color - like yellow - the letters are not going to show up once you peel the stickers off and expose the white paper. So then you'll have to go back in with a tiny paintbrush and fill in the letters with black, cursing the day you were born.
3. If you ignore #1 and #2, make sure you at least start early in the day. I started around 8:00. Left my friend's house around 11:00 and it took me...maybe 30 min to get home? I was up until about 3:00 filling in the letters and doing my final layer of Mod Podge. Granted, I was also watching Orange is the New Black, so I might not have been super speedy.

ANYWAY, here is the final result:

pre-yellow
Some might think I should've left it like this.
I don't disagree...

with the yellow
There is an Instagram filter on this bad boy, but you get the idea.

It was fun. 8/10 - I would do it again. Only I'd be smarter about it.

est. 2010

You guys - I'm really excited. I already posted about this project, but here's my step-by-step creation of it.

You need to know....I've started this a couple days before it's done. So right now I'm all full of hope at how awesome it's going to be. After I've finished and have been defeated I may be singing a different tune. We'll just see. Right now I think it's gonna be awesome!!!

So, like I said before, here is my inspiration:

source

And I already mentioned I'll be doing "est. 2010" instead of "LOVE"... And we shrank it down from 3.5' x 3.5' to 2' x 2' to make it more manageable and less likely to fall off our wall and dead us.

So, anyway...PICTURES!

01/20/13

 This is Mr. T helping me draw the heart. I had marked the important points and he filled in the shape itself.

 You can kind of see what we did:

• Bottom: center of the board (1' from left and right), 1" from bottom
• Top (lowest point): center of board (1' from left and right), 6" from top
• Peaks (highest points): 6" from left or right, 1" from top
• Outside (widest points): 1" from left or right, 8" from top

Mr. T drew straight lines connecting all the dots, then drew curved lines to make it more heart shaped. I'm glad he did it, because I would have had a nervous breakdown if I was the one trying to do it. Plus the heart would be seriously deformed.

We added nails around the outline. I did space these evenly - I used the ruler's width, so it's a little bit more than 1" I think. It worked out pretty well, but there were a couple times where the distance would be a bit too short or long for the ruler, but not enough to be noticeable. (I would start from two points and meet in the middle, so I wouldn't get the curve too wonky.)

01/21/13

I tried out a bunch of different fonts in MS Word, trying to find one that was fat enough, tall enough, and not crazy curvy. This one is called "pupcat" which is I think the weirdest default MS Word font name I've ever seen. But anyway. I increased the font size, made it bold, and printed it off. I also added some spaces between the letters so it wouldn't be so cramped. I made the font white and gave it a black outline, so I wouldn't waste so much ink.

I ended up putting it on the left side instead of the right side. I wanted the "est." to be above and to the left of "2010" without it being in the middle of the heart. It looks so pretty!

omg you guys - omg. This is my nightmare. I think I invented new swear words while doing this part. The wood is too hard for the combination of my weak arm, cheap nails, and small hammer. None of them went in straight. Several times nails would bounce OUT of the wood and ricochet across the room. I did NOT evenly space these bad boys, either. I just put a bajillion in, because these characters are so freaking curvy. Should've gotten married in 2011. Or 1111. Or I should have just put "LOVE" in there.

It took me forever. And I didn't get "2010" finished before Baby O (our roommates' daughter) needed to go to bed. So I still had to do the '2' and spray paint it on Tuesday. Ladies' Night was Wednesday and I wanted to have everything done but adding the thread. Figured that would take long enough without having to wait on paint to dry.

I was hoping that once the nails were painted white they would blend in with the background enough that "est. 2010" would become more legible. It mostly did anyway, but that 'e'....not so much. And some of the nail placement got a little wonky. I hit my thumb so many times.... I can't complain enough about hammering in all the nails for "est. 2010"

Oh! Important thing to remember - start at the bottom right! I started with the left side of the 'e' - the right side of the 'e' and all of the 's' sucked balls. I did it right with "2010" and things went more smoothly. There was still a lot of swearing, and I'm glad our floor is carpet with concrete underneath, because I used that as an opportunity to hit the floor really hard when I got angry. Once I snapped and hit a nail....it bent completely sideways and I almost never got it back out of the plywood.

01/22/13

Finished the '2' and I didn't kill anyone. Success! It was really hard to read...I hoped it would get better with a coat of paint to make it all the same color (white). That way the pink thread would really stand out.

Well. In the inspiration piece, she used silver nails. I grabbed these yellowish nails....I didn't think about if they had some sort of weird finish on them - they were just cheap. Which, in hindsight, was a mistake on many levels. Sometimes pay more now and swear less later. THE MORE YOU KNOW. Anyway - when we spray painted it white, the nails did not turn white. They turned yellow. And then the yellow bled onto the plywood. So the nails are yellow and there is a little yellow halo around them on the wood. Whatever. CAN'T BE HELPED. I did two coats and Mr. T did a third. It never got better. Moving on.

12/23/12

Finished!!!! Almost. That blasted 'e' is still hard to read! And you can tell my nails didn't go in straight because the outline of the heart is a little wonky. But. It was made with loooooooove. *eyelash flutter* I'm going to go back over it once more again and hope that helps. I'm also putting a drop of glue on every nail head and spraying the entire thing with some sort of clear spray paint/epoxy somethingsomething to stiffen up the thread (aww, yeah...) so it - hopefully - won't come off the nails. You guys. If this thing tears up in the next decade there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Also, I painted the edges pink, too. You can see how she did her edges a lime green in the inspiration piece. I didn't get a good shot of my edges, though. Maybe if when it finally gets hung up on the wall I can get a picture of it.

I'm going to give this project.... 4/5 stars.

• Difficulty: 2/5 (low numbers mean difficult)
• Appearance: 4/5 (I always see imperfections in my work)
• Time: 3/5 (It took me four nights!)
• Compliments: 5/5 (Everyone really likes it, so yay.)

Will I do any similar crafts? Maybe? First let's try to get this bad boy up on the wall.