For Christmas 2009, I bought Mason's Dad a framed picture with his last name for our home. It was a unique gift and looked pretty classy in the front hall.
The company making these is Alphabet Photography and the prices range from $99 - $169 + tax (free shipping).
When I redesigned Mason's room, I needed more art on the wall so I went back to this website to see about creating a new picture for Mason. The downside was two-fold.
- the pictures were of architecture and didn't really relate to a 5 year old
- the price was quite high (even with Christmas discounts)
So I do what I always do...I set out to make my own.
Here is a step by step guide:
Picture Frame - I tried to find one that would accommodate a matte with the spacing but unfortunately most mattes have 3 or 4 spaces (fine if your kids name is Amy or Kent) so I opted for a frame without the spacing. I hit up Ikea and purchased a Ribba frame for $12.99+tax.
Letters - I discovered that you can download alphabet letters royalty & copyright free via Flickr. Unfortunately the site isn't very easy to navigate but the link is here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/sets/
Simply type 'Letter M' or Letter B (whatever your letter is) in the search field (Click on Leo Reynolds' Photostream and the page should refresh with pictures of that letter.
Creation - I then had to re-size & connect the letters together. I used the 'collage' function of Picasa. If you don't have Picasa, you can download it for free, here.
Now this is the tricky part. As you can see from the image up top, the pictures are scaled to size. Unfortunately with my limited photo editing skills, I wasn't able to enlarge each of the pictures separately to fit my frame. So I decided to create one file and enlarge as big as I could get it which happened to be the size of the frame!
Printing - as a former Employee of Staples, I'm partial to their store. I took my thumbdrive with my image and handed to the Copy Center associate. I told her I wanted the file enlarged to fit the frame (I brought the paper insert for sizing). She sent the file to the poster printer (my frame was larger than 11x17) and within a minute, I had a large glossy copy of my image. Cost? $12.00. She offered to cut it for me at a cost, but I opted to do it myself. Staples does have a paper cutter in the self serve copy area.
Once I got home, I made my cut and popped it in the frame. Grabbed some Windex to clean the glass and onto the wall it went.
And the finished product:
The letters were custom to Mason's favorite things:
M - Mc'Donalds
A - Mickey Mouse (We are going to Disneyland next month)
S - Super Man
O - Sprinkle donut
N - Blocks (he loves buiding)