Geekscape Crafts: Your Favorite Quotes As Works Of Art
You know when you walk into your friend’s mom’s house and there will be a generic quote about children’s laughter or somesuch features prominently in the hallway, or perhaps something about “the footsteps of friends” on a plaque by the doorbell? Well, for my first craft blog on Geekscape I decided to do a geeky version of that. Because while children’s laughter is great and all I need something a little more personal to decorate my walls. And I had just the quote for it.
I first ran across the quote from Tolkien when I was writing my wedding invitations a while back. I thought a nice quote about love from one of my favorite authors would do the trick. “Ok!” I said with excitement as I typed “Ray Bradbury love quote” into Google. Then I thought about that creepy Ray Bradbury story where a honeymoon couple goes to Mexico and visit a catacomb and it drives the woman literally insane. I erased it before searching. “Tolkien should be safe…” I thought hesitantly as I hit enter on a new search. Well, I found a quote by Tolkien that had the word “love” in it, but not in the romantic sense.
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for it’s swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
“Ahh, I thought, “that’s a nice quote…that has nothing to do with marriage.” I abandoned my hopes of finding a good wedding invitation quote, but I tucked those sentences away for later, knowing I’d find a use for them somewhere.
A few months went by and my husband and I were putting his sword collection up on the wall of our new home. There was a perfect space for a canvas below the morning star and one of the more dangerous looking of knives, and I knew I’d finally found a use for that quote.
The question was how. I hate painting words with a fiery passion, and my inking hand isn’t the steadiest for such large work, especially on a canvas. After some pondering I opted for iron-on transfers. You know, the kind you use to make T-shirts. I made some rookie mistakes, so I was glad I had bought boxes of them on sale ten years ago. (Hoarding art supplies ftw!)
I had totally printed the entire quote out on several sheets of paper before I went “oh, wait, that’s going to be backwards.” Then I had to figure out how to reverse the text in Microsoft Word (there’s no easy way, technically you can turn it into an image and reverse the image, but because of the nature of my particular text it wouldn’t work), instead I opted to copy paste into paint and reverse the image from there. (Print preview is also your friend. I kept on forgetting to turn the image into landscape, I really shouldn’t do art projects when I’m hungry.)
After the printing was all settled I got my iron out at went to it. The first attempt was…less the stellar. The key to iron-on transfers is cutting enough excess of blank excess away so that it doesn’t leave strips of noticeable residue behind when you peel off the paper. Also, totally not supposed to use steam, or it leaves the cracks in the ink. And you have to be careful not leave the iron in one place too long or it will burn the canvas, leaving a yellowed tinge.
When I had laid out everything I was doing it late at night and was being rather careless, I totally mixed up part of the saying, and one of the words moved when I ironed it leaving an inky unreadable smear across the canvas. “It’s cool” I said, after a lot of “frakidity frak fraks” “I’ll just fix it with some paint.” Then the iron touched the line above it as I was trying to get the bottom line done. I had, in my impatience, removed the paper for the line above but needed to keep the iron on the bottom line longer. At that point I decided to call it a night and be thankful I had another canvas to work with.
After a day or two I worked on my second draft, while not perfect, was good enough to hang on my wall. I cut much closer to the letters this time, was careful with how long I spent with each line with the iron. I laid each piece out so I could get an idea of where I wanted it to lay, then lined them up in order right next to the canvas, only putting them on when I was ready to iron and leaving the paper on all of the pieces until they had cooled.
As a result I had a much cleaner time about things and, though the “glory” and “defend” are a little cockeyed, and there’s no period at the end of the last sentence, I’m totally OK with it. The first “I” did not have all of its ink transfer, so I touched it up with a wee bit of sharpie.
Here’s the end result, I think it suits our sword wall quite nicely, and I recommend this craft for anyone that has a favorite quote (geeky or otherwise) they’d like to hang on a wall. It’s easy (if you’re not being impatient), super cheap, and a fast way to put a personal touch in your home.
