I love quotes.  I think they can be powerful and help you make sense of things, see things from another way, validate your feelings or just entertain you.  I also love fonts.  So it only makes sense that the creative side of me really wants to make signs.  I had seen a quote recently that I have been dying to do something with.  “Not my circus.  Not my monkeys.”  Apparently, it’s origins are as a Polish Proverb.  This speaks to me as I tend to get wrapped up in and worry about family dramas (and which family doesn’t have these!?!?!?).  This tells me to step back and try to worry less about things that are: a) not my business and b) out of my control.

I am playing around with different mediums of signs – canvas, wood, burlap, etc.  I recently discovered pre-made black canvases which seem like a bit of a time-saving step to me as I am almost always going to feel the need to do something with a white canvas before doing a quote, but may skip that step with the black background.  I picked one up at a recent excursion to Hobby Lobby.  These are new to my area and the closest is 45 minutes away.  We are getting our own in March or so and I can’t wait!

I love working with vinyl, so for this sign I decided to use the mask of the vinyl and paint the inside.  Here goes

Materials:

• Black 12×12 canvas
• White paint
• Foam paintbrush
• Vinyl
• Pampered Chef Scraper (the little brown thing used to clean your stoneware)
• Cricut & Gypsy
• Storybook Cricut cartridge

I started by playing around on my Cricut Gypsy/Craft Room looking for the perfect font.  I wanted something “circusy”.  I played around with Storybook and added the embellishments to the letters.  Perfect, but after I cut them out I realized I was never going to be able to use the mask of the vinyl to paint them.  I ended up throwing them on a piece of paper and we’ll see what I end up doing with that.

I then dialed back the fanciful font to one of the basic, slightly fatter ones on the cartridge.  I got a little too excited and ripped off the mask that I needed for my painting project – ooops.  My husband would describe this as 1, 2, GOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

I finally hit my stride and ended up with a simple finished product.

On to the next project!