Custom Classroom Letters

My little sister recently signed her first teaching contract and is in preparations to get her classroom ready for the start of school. Between the two of us, we came up with quite a few cute ideas for her room. The first thing she wanted to have made was the word "Inpsire" to hang on her wall. She went to Hobby Lobby and got the letters, paper and paint and I lucked out in finding the embellishments on a trip to Wal-Mart.

I took all of the letters out into the yard, turned them backwards (you only need to paint the backs and sides of the letters) and spray painted them all black.

When everything was dry, I brought them inside and traced all of them on the scrapbook paper. Remember to put the right side of the letter down on the wrong side of the paper to trace it.

Here are all of the letters all cut out. She is doing a black and white theme (all different patterns) with accents of red.

Then, I got my spray adhesive out to glue all of the paper to the letters. Be careful if you use this stuff - this is the best spray glue I have ever used but it sticks to everything! I ruined a scrapbook cutting mat when I was working on the nursery letters, so I just put an old catalog down on the mat for the remainder of that project and its stuck to the mat. I do all of my gluing on it now!

The process of gluing and smoothing the paper down is very fast. This is the basis of what the letters will look like.

Because I'm anal, I flip the letters over and cut all of that excess off with an xacto knife.

Then I started embellishing! I bought a package of these white flowers (4 were in a pack). I decided to use one of the large ones as they were, but really needed two of the smaller ones to be black.

So, I got out my trusty spray paint and painted them black. First, I took the rhinestone off the middle, then sprayed them and then glued it back once they were dry.

For the other letters, I used these self-adhesive rhinestones. I had to apply them with tweezers because they are very small, but after a couple of hours (yes, I said hours), I got them all on!

I put rhinestones everywhere the lines connected on 3 of the letters.

The black spray painted flowers came out pretty nicely, I think!

The paper on this letter was "busy" enough so I didn't add anything to it.

This is another letter with rhinestones.

Like the "S", I left this one alone.

The white flower, just like it was bought. I just added some spray glue to the back for extra hold.

And then the last letter with rhinestones. All in all, I think they turned out really well. The most important part is, my little sister is really happy with them. She has decided that she's going to get some red ribbon to hang them up with. I can't wait to see them in her room!