38 Words that Almost Did Me In...

You guys.  I swear this project almost killed me.  Not because it was difficult, but because it took me SO LONG.  And almost took away my ability to raise my right arm in the process.

It started innocently enough.  When I up-cycled my chalkboard, I knew that I wanted to change the art each month and that some version of subway art would be one of my choices for either November or December, because I can think of a bunch of words relevant to both Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I have some other ideas for Christmas, so when the calendar clicked to November 1, I decided to roll with the subway art idea.  I printed out words reminiscent of November (at least in my mind) in various fonts and sizes, and used painter's tape to arrange the words on the chalkboard.

Getting the arrangement of the words to look like it was balanced and creative, yet purposeful took longer than I expected it to, but was pretty easy overall.

The next step was to use a chalk transfer process to transfer the words onto the chalkboard.  To do so, I took one word at a time off the chalkboard, rubbed chalk on the back of the paper, and replaced it on the board.  I then took a pencil and traced and filled in each letter, which transferred the chalk from the back of the paper onto the chalkboard perfectly.

One tip that I have while doing this transfer process would be to work from left to right and top to bottom, so that your hand and arm do not rub the letters you have already transferred.  I would also suggest that you remove the papers only when chalking the words, so that your careful arrangement of words is not lost.

Once you are done transferring the words, you can use a wet cotton swab to carefully clean up any chalk that has transferred outside of the letters.

You can see that I needed to do some clean up around the words above.

On a letter by letter basis, this transfer process is really easy.  But transferring thirty-eight words on a five foot tall chalkboard ended up taking DAYS.  And many, many hours.  Way longer than I expected.  In fact, I started the transfer process on Tuesday and did not finish it until Sunday night (after spending almost all of Sunday working on it).

And it looks great.  It really does.  I can almost enjoy it in spite of my aching right wrist and sore neck and shoulders that are the result of crouching on the floor for hours finishing the bottom portion.

So enjoy this one, loves!  You won't be seeing anything else like it from

 me anytime soon :)

It DOES look good though, doesn't it?!  Almost worth it....

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