Subway tile- the tutorial

Ever since I've seen these tiles, I've wanted to make one. Evan and I got together and decided what things we want to teach out children to do. It's just what we do as a family. I started by printing them off in Word. It was a bit tricky to find the right spacing and font size, but I somehow did it.

Then I had it printed at fedex/kinkos on a HUGE piece of paper.
In order to know how big to make the board, I needed to calculate the final size of the wording.
So...

I cut the pieces of paper just at the top and bottom of the letters, and put them together, measured, and cut my board.

I bought cheapo wood at HD and cut and glued and nailed them together.

It looks VERY homemade, but also perfectly sized.
I wanted the final wording to look more natural than white, so I went to work and stained the wood a dark walnut color.

Then spray painted an almond color on top of that. Then I was ready for the tedious part.

I glued each word strip to con-tact paper with some spray adhesive, and when it was dry, I cut them out and started measuring, cutting and pasting each INDIVIDUAL letter onto the board.

I marked each letter placement before I cut all the letters out, then stuck them down on the con-tact paper side. This is why it's taken me 3 months to complete. I left it sitting out on my table for the 2 months we were in Cali.

Now that the lettering was all done, I went over all the letters with my finger to stick them down one last time before I painted it black.
Some of the letters were peeling up at the edges, which didn't bother me too much, but I knew I couldn't touch them up after if they were too black (keep watching).

So I spray painted everything. As you see, some of the letters were peeling up, especially the D in attend. After I was done with the top coat, I tried to stick the D back down with my finger, and it came right off. So now I have a big finger print on the D, but I knew as a first-timer, it wouldn't look perfect. Everything else turned out better than expected.

I took some sand paper to it a few days later, and here it is, hanging in my hallway. I'm quite excited to see how well it turned out because of the countless hours it took me to make it. I've learned some things along the way, and I'd do it again...if I had to.