Wedding Blog

I’m pretty close to completion on my current little diy goodness and I figured I’d show it off.

Way back when we first got engaged, I came across this lovely image (it was so long ago and I have no clue who it belongs to; if you do, please let me know!):

Since I’m a preppy monogram fiend, I HAD to have our initials in some sort of organic matter. Since I’m cheap, I knew I had to figure out to create them myself. Turns out it’s not that bad.

If you’re playing along, here’s what you’ll need (for 2 24” letters):

• 2 large foam sheets (green would be best, I ended up with white and I had to use a lot more moss to make sure no white showed through)
• 1 hot glue gun with glue sticks
• Elmer’s glue
• Floral pins (the u shaped ones)
• Monofilament (fishing wire, it really doesn’t matter what ‘size’)
• 2 Heavy poster boards
• Pencil, sharpie, scissors, serrated knife
• Lots of moss (I used Super Moss from Hobby Lobby [which I believe is sold at craft stores everywhere] since it was 50% off; because so much is needed for complete coverage I would recommend buying in bulk online)
• PC with word processor (unless you want to freehand your letters…)
• Access to a large scale copy machine
• Ribbon to coordinate your wedding palette

How it’s done:

I opened up Microsoft Word and typed my M and P in separate documents blowing them up to about 100 pt. and bolding them. I used Feel Script first then Garamond when I decided the swirls of the script would be a massive pain to cut, etc. Once I had them printed out the way I wanted them, I headed over to Office Max to visit the lovely girl who printed our save the dates. She helped me use the coolest copier I’ve ever seen to blow the letters up 333% (I think it’s used for blueprints most of the time). I took my big letters back to the office and cut them out. I then taped each letter to a poster board and cut it out again, thus creating my patterns.

Once I got home I took the 2 large pieces of foam and hot glued them together to make one really large piece. This wasn’t just a bead of hot glue – I probably used 3 sticks to make sure it held well and let it dry overnight.

The next day I pinned my patterns onto the foam and traced onto the foam with the Sharpie. I then took the whole thing out to the garage and proceeded to use my serrated knife to cut the letters out. Two notes on this: 1 – make sure to do this outside as it is a big mess with styrofoam flying all over the place; 2 – don’t worry if the letters aren’t cut out perfectly as they’ll be covered up with the moss soon (I even ended up breaking pieces of the M off accidentally and had to reglue). Anyhow, once they were cut out I moved them back inside to get covered.

This next step was pretty fun! I slapped the Elmer’s down and laid the moss on top, pinning every now and again when it looked like it needed it. I decided to cover both the front and the back of both of my letters (which is another reason I made like 50 trips to Hobby Lobby over the course of the project). Once they were completely covered in the moss, I set them aside to dry overnight (truth be told it was more like 3 or 4 nights as I was sick of working on them).

Once I finally decided to complete the job I didn’t have much left to do. I strung the monofilament around the letters as tightly as I could and secured it in the back of the letters (you can see the light glint off of the plastic wire ever so slightly, but I got over it). I then gave each one a little haircut to trim the stray and unruly moss pieces (although you could leave it for a more organic and natural look), and sprayed a bit of hairspray to hold it all together (I know it sounds crazy, but I really think it helped!).

Lastly I plan on attaching some of the Paper Source Night Satin ribbon (left over from the save the dates – bonus!).

And that should be it!

Once I’m done I’ll have to find a safe little home for these guys for the next 8 months. One of our groomsmen, S, was over the other night for dinner and thought they were the funniest looking things – he also thought it was just hilarious that I was making them so far in advance. Oh well, boys just don’t understand.

Are you making monogram letters for your wedding?