In my search for ways to decorate the nursery, I stumbled across this and was inspired. I just loved all the cute ideas for an alphabet wall. I did not realize however, until a few days ago, how expensive it would be to do.
The problem is not finding the wooden letters. Many craft stores sell a variety of unfinished wooden letters in various fonts that are perfect for this, but they're just so expensive. Going into it I thought I could just buy an alphabet pack of letters and go from there. It was nearly impossible to find anything like that. Almost everywhere I looked, in stores, and online, made you buy the letters individually. Then, depending on the size you wanted for each letter, they could range from $1.50 to $5 each. That shocked me. I never thought they would be so expensive!
After realizing I would not be able to do the project as I originally had intended I decided to try and figure out a different way to achieve the same outcome. So here for you, is my DIY version of an alphabet wall. And all I spent was $4.
Supplies
Cardboard
Scissors
Sharpie
Pencil
Paper
Crayons
Paint
Paint brushes
Luckily I have been getting lots of baby goodies so I had tons of cardboard boxes piled up. The first thing that I did was cut up 26 cardboard squares. I chose to make mine different sizes, but you could just as easily make them all the same size.
Next, I brainstormed what I wanted my letters to look like. You can make just plain letters in various fonts, but I decided it would be fun to make the letters look like something that started with that letter (for example: A for Alligator).
Next, I sketched the letters out on the cardboard in pencil, and then outlined in sharpie.
Then I painted all of the letters. This was time consuming and space consuming because I did it one color at a time. I didn't worry too much about staying inside the lines because after the painting was finished, I went back over the letters with a sharpie getting all the edges and details to stand out.
The last, and hardest part of the project was cutting the letters out. Especially if there were a lot of little details to cut out. These Octopus legs were a challenge. Luckily, my wonderful husband offered to help. So I cut out the big chunks with scissors and he did the more challenging parts with an exacto knife. We finally got it finished, even though by the end our hands were very sore. Then, I got to have the joy of hanging them on the wall and seeing the finished product. I just used 3M to hang them.
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