Completely Overboard

It was a simple request. Can you make some signs for the open house on Saturday so people know where to go? Sure. No problem.

The request came from a lady at our church. The open house is for our pastor who is retiring in a few short weeks after 31 years as senior pastor.

Pretty easy, right? Make some signs. So I bought some poster board at Target. Then I thought, hey, my sister has a Cricut. I could use that to make letters from pretty paper and make it look nicer.

So my sister dragged her Cricut over to my house, and we spent some time cutting out letters for 3 signs. Great, right? Just glue them to the poster board and we’re good, right?

I laid it out, and I just wasn’t feeling it. I mean, it was fine. But it just felt really boring. Keep in mind, friends, this is a sign. It’s designed to direct people where to go. It’s not something anyone is going to hang in their house.

But I just wasn’t happy with it. I decided the reason I didn’t like it was that the white was so stark. It would be so much better if the background was a different color.

What was I going to do about it? I mean, it’s not like I was going to paint the thing. Plus it’s shiny paper, so paint would likely not stick well. Not to mention that it’s a pain to clean out all those paintbrushes and other materials.

But then I remembered. I have alcohol inks! If you’ve never heard of alcohol inks, they’re… inks… made with alcohol… so they dry pretty quick. And they have this blending solution, too. Ok, so that’s not a great explanation. But you can do some cool stuff with them. And the bonus is that they don’t take that long. Oh, and the shiny-ness of the paper is ideal for alcohol inks.

So then inked up the poster boards. It looked pretty cool. And it didn’t take terribly long at all. See? This was still pretty easy. And now these things will look awesome.

This is where it all fell apart, friends.

I laid out the letters again and…

the letters didn’t stand out well enough at all.

At this point, I really should have gone back and put the letters back on white poster board. I had more. But now I was invested. I couldn’t just turn my back on this project. Besides, these things looked cool.

But I wasn’t going to go and cut out all those letters again. That was kind of a pain and used up a lot of paper.

There was only one solution.

I had to take each individual letter and ink the edges with a stamp pad. Good gravy, this was time-consuming and a pain. My sister was doing this for a little while when I was working on other things, but then she made up some lame excuse like she had to go to work or something and then just left me with piles of letters to do by myself. The nerve.

So, here’s the finished product. And guess what? You still can’t read it that well. So, it kind of doesn’t even do it’s job. And I’m not even going to tell you how many hours I spent to make 3 of these signs.

The moral of this story? Know when to stop. Stop when you have cool letters but not so cool poster board. It’s good enough. Just STOP before you make it worse and defeat the purpose. It’s not even like these signs can ever be used again for anything.

Just stop.

Thank you.