WORD

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
–John 1:1


We found an example of this paper-roll idea on Pinterest, and loved the concept for WORD.
Angela faithfully crafted the paper rolls out of pages from old hymn books (thank you, Mary Kaufman) until we had a large amount of the paper tubes. We weren't certain we were going to have enough, so she even solicited a donation from the local library. On close examination, you may see advice on disease prevention mixed in with the hymns.

We handed her a stack of old hymnals, pointed her towards the picture on Pinterest, and I made some more airy hand-waving gestures and provided vague directions involving Elmer's glue, rubber bands, the need for solid rolls, trailing off...

It's a good thing Angela likes being crafty and was able to figure out how to make these. She discovered better directions on a website and used a hot glue gun to make the paper rolls. The end result was four grocery bags nearly full of nice tight tubes of paper.

Meanwhile, Wendy and I prepared a large board to use for the sign. When the paper tubes were ready, I started chalking in the letter outlines. W-O-R...and then I ran out of room. Either the board wasn't long enough or the letters were too large.

Wendy and I had another one of our Highly Professional Work Conferences, wherein we make a lot of sarcastic and semi-insulting remarks and laugh and range off-topic and finally remember the point and hem and haw and Wendy usually says, "well, it's up to you," and I say, "hmm, what do you think?" and then we typically (99.99 percent of the time) land on the decision that means more work but we think will look better.

That means we made a new board so we could have the larger letters. The end result is over eight feet wide and made the most of those beautiful paper rolls.

For those of you interested in assembly, here are the steps:

Wendy cut the boards and fastened vertical braces on the back to form the sign. I painted the entire sign a solid coat of serious gray. Seriously, it's Sherwin Williams Serious Gray (We seriously made a lot of serious jokes while we seriously painted serious sign boards Serious Gray.)

After the gray dried (seriously), I dry brushed on a few random strokes of pink. Then I hit the whole surface with the orbital sander. To age the surface to complement the vintage hymn pages, I brushed on and rubbed off a layer of dark stain.

The paper tubes were the width of the hymnal, so we planned to use a scroll saw to cut them to the proper width. After a slight workplace hazard involving saw blades pinging around the room, we abandoned the saw and used branch clippers.  Because we enjoy making things much harder than they need to be.

I chalked the letters onto the board to provide a guide, then we laid out the paper rolls and chopped them as needed.

Then Angela and Wendy were incredibly patient while I had a short OCD moment to check the baseline, the caps height, the kerning and the leading. Thanks for that nerd moment.

Finally, Angela had another long interlude with E6000 to attach all the paper rolls. The end result is beautiful, and is a testament to my sister-in-law's patience and devotion.