I can’t wait for newborn photographs with my new baby that I am expecting so soon. I also wanted to find a neat and unique way to announce his arrival at the hospital. I’ve seen a lot of people doing the felt letter boards, but I wanted something different.
I made this super easy sign for photos when my son Brayden is born. It has some twine already attached to hang on the hospital door and I’ll also place it in the hospital bassinet with him to take pictures.
I got all of the supplies at Michael’s and you don’t even need a fancy Circuit machine to make the stencils. It only cost me $9 to make and that’s including buying the paint pens which I already had.
You can purchase wood signs in different layouts and stains and always go with a 40-50% off coupon. This one cost me about $2.50 with 50% off. The paint pens are great to have and I used the thicker line for the larger letters and fine line for the smaller letters. I’ll bring the fine line pen to the hospital with me to fill in the info when he’s born.
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You can use this stencil making website to create the large font stencil, but it only lets you do one size for free so if you need a different font size, you need to type it out yourself. So I typed out my info on Pages and here I used the font Bromello. You can download this font here or just use any font of your choice.
This is what the finished product looked like for his photos:
Items you will need:
Wooden pallet board with hanging twine
White Paint Pen (fine line & thick line)
Printer
White colored pencil
Pencil
First, type out your print in the font, orientation, and size you would like and print it out. You can cut the paper to fit your board so don’t worry so much about the layout, but make sure the font size is proportioned. I did two separate print outs for the large letters and small letters.
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Turn the paper over and using the white colored pencil, color completely over all the parts of the letters and words. You may need to take a couple breaks- this really hurt my hand after awhile!
Tape the paper onto the board exactly how you want it to appear. Make sure to adjust for any lines or cut outs in the board if it has separate pallets like mine. You want to try and avoid the letters going over the lines if you can. As you can see, I couldn’t manage to do that for the B and Y in Brayden, but all the other letters were lined up perfectly.
Trace and outline all the parts of each letter with a very sharp pencil. Make sure you taped it down well enough so that the paper does not move.
Take off the paper and you should have a faint white outline of all your words. Trace over that outline and fill in the letters with your paint pen. You may have to go over the letters 2 or 3 times to get it nice and dark.
That’s it! Very simple and quick! Don’t for get to bring your thin paint pen in your hospital bag to fill in the stats.
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After birth, I wanted to display it in his nursery as a keepsake. You can either hang it on the door or closet by the string or prop it up on a dresser or nightstand. I found this stuffed animal that was the perfect size to use as a ‘holder’ for the sign so it’s always displayed.
