dear little pemberley: Lettering

"How do you make your chalkboards every week? You must have perfect handwriting!" ...these are comments I read from my friends on Baby Bump that I have to chuckle at. My handwriting is nowhere near perfect! Not to mention, chalk is hard to work with.

I used to just freehand my chalkboards every week, or print out what I wanted them to look like in Microsoft Word and then eyeball the fonts. That led to *many* frustrating Tuesday nights, when I'd work my weekly boards. I'm pretty sure I uttered every word in the book trying to make the letters perfect and straight, and my husband thought I was crazy for spending hours on each board every week. After researching a little bit on Pinterest, I found other tutorials like Sugar and Charm and Shine Your Light that made so much sense! I stick to this style and now kick myself for not thinking of it sooner.

Easy Chalkboard Lettering Tutorial

Step One:: Go crazy downloading some fonts! My favorites are Bombshell Pro, all of the Fonts for Peas, Jacques and Gilles, and Clementine Sketch. I spent a lot of time (seriously...way too much time) on DaFont and Font Space browsing to see what's out there. Once you've decided on a font (or two or three), print them out. We don't have Microsoft Publisher, so I was stuck printing out large letters and numbers one-to-a-page. This is the number 9 in the font Janda Happy Day.

Step Two:: Pick a chalk and start coloring! Heavily color the back of whatever you're printing. Don't go nuts covering up too much space, though, or your next few steps will be harder than necessary.

Step Three:: Put your paper on your chalkboard and start tracing! I use a pencil eraser to go over the letters and numbers because it makes a soft outline. I couldn't get a picture of this step, but if you look in Step Four, you'll see the outlines that I'm explaining. This is where your careful attention to Step Two comes into play. If you were to have colored in that entire number 9, you would be able to see it from chalk transference when you traced it. Make sure that you're tracing straight, or you'll end up with beautiful (but slanted) text!

Step Four:: Color inside the lines! Or don't...if you like the outline effect, you can skip to Step Five. It really depends on the font that you've chosen.

Step Five:: Clean that bad boy up! I like to use a wet Q-Tip to remove any stray marks or mess-ups. Or, alternatively, sometimes I get mad and use a wet hand towel to start all over because I didn't pay attention to Step Three and didn't trace straight.

Step Six:: Step back and admire your handiwork! You don't have to have perfect handwriting, but you can have perfect (or nearly perfect!) chalkboards.