You must be the Change....

It has been a long time since my last posting about words on the wall. Today we were celebrating a family birthday and I finally cut and installed this quote for my sister-in-law (we had talked about this months ago but just hadn't done it!). I decided to use a cursive font so I could cut entire words that would weld nicely and stay on a level line. This made installation easier - there were only 12 words plus Gandhi's name. I used blue painter's tape to get a level line on the beam.



The photos are long and skinny so here are a couple of close up views of the quote.



I used the Wall Pops vinyl which cuts beautifully in the Cricut. I set the blade depth at 4 and pressure and speed at medium - these settings cut the vinyl but not the backing so you can just peel the entire word off the backing without having to fuss with separating the letters as you would if you had individual letters fully cut out through the backing.

By using Design Studio, I could conserve the amount of vinyl I needed to use. First, I typed out all of the words and welded them as you can see in this screen shot.



I then checked the quote and realized that I had written "want" instead of "wish," so I fixed that and also added Gandhi's name. Once I had all of the words sorted out, I started copying and pasting them onto additional pages in the file, rotating the words to fit as closely as possible. Here are screen shots of my two cutting mats - one 12 x 24 and one 12 x 12.






For the quote, I set the letter size at 3 inches and I then did Gandhi's name at 1 1/2 inches. I thought that the printing 101 "G" was easier to read than the Cursive 101 "G" so I cut both versions for my sister-in-law to choose her favorite. Below you can see the two choices...



I also cut quote marks and an equal sign to trim for a "dash" before Gandhi's name. I had forgotten the period for the end of the sentence but we just used a regular hole punch to cut one.

By carefully "squeezing" together the words for cutting, I was able to create the entire project with 30 inches of the 6 1/2 inch vinyl stripe size of the Wall Pops. When I bought the vinyl it was about $10 for a 16 foot roll so the cost to make this was very reasonable - less than $2.

Here is a LINK to a few other posts on my blog about wall words projects. These are a lot of fun to do and I am now motivated to get some done for my studio!