One Little Family

I wanted to add a DIY post.  We love DIY projects, and they usually have something to do with furniture rehab, a household project, or something decorative.  As we are the parents of 3 boys, and their walls in our house in Utah were bare, we decided to do something about it.  Though to be fair, it was only Liam and Nolan at the time.

Tools and Materials needed:
- Felt
- Paint
- MDF
- Vises/clamps
- Wood glue
- Brad nailer and 3/4" finish nails
- Jigsaw

So this was a few years ago.

Chrissa found a blog with a picture of super hero emblems made out of MDF.  She thought they were really neat so we decided to take some SVG logos of Captain America, Superman, and Batman into Kinko's and have them printed up - black and white - on a size picked.

SVG files are scalable, meaning there's no fuzzy inconsistencies to the edges of the graphics when you scale them up or down.  You can manipulate them (if you want) in Inkscape (totally free!) and Kinko's will be cool enough to print them if you can convince them it's not for commercial use.  Since we didn't want to sell our stuff, and the kids at Kinko's in Logan were duly convinced, we had each one printed on paper.  It cost about $15 for all 3.  (By the by, this is not so for Wal-Mart.  I once used Lego Batman as a template to print up some fake tickets for Liam's Birthday party as invites, and they were clearly such, but Wal-Mart refused to print.  Kinko's got my business there.  I swear I made no money off the likenesses, so I'm pretty sure it was kosher.  Anyway.)

Here's an example SVG:

Compared with a JPG:

The above is zoomed in on Batman's ear as a JPG.  Not so clean.  The SVG would still be sharp.  Anyway...

Then we went to Home Depot, got some .5" MDF, and took that home, too.  In the garage I setup my two saw horses and straddled two 2x4's across, and laid the MDF down flat on them.  This way I could flat on the MDF with a jigsaw and the blade could go through without damaging a bench below me.  

Before any cuts for the emblem, Chrissa and a background piece to the rectangle size we wanted.  Then we took another sheet of MDF, taped our cutouts to them, and traced the edges.  Cut away or keep the black/white as you want; it depends on what you want to end up with for your final product.  We discarded the black and kept the white, as seen below.  The trace wasn't perfect, but it's good to make it as clean as possible, because your jig-saw cut will be imperfect enough as it is.

It took a lot of positioning and me constantly blowing on the blade to keep the dust away, but, at the end of a few hours I had this:

After a few more cutouts, traces, and cutting, we had this:

With that all being done, it was time to paint, glue, and nail...

To attach to the background piece of MDF and provide further color, we cut out pieces of brightly colored flannel.  It may not be clear from the pictures, but everywhere the emblem piece of wood has space in it where it would let the background piece show through, we sandwiched felt in between.  When it was time to do Superman, we needed several layers of yellow felt because the blue background was too dark and the yellow too thin.  Unfortunately this meant that the sandwich wasn't perfectly flat.  So I got out a few pieces of  scrap wood and some clamps, put glue between the pieces of MDF, and sandwiched ALL of it in the scrap wood and put down the clamps to hold it overnight.  I did that for all 3, just to keep the pressure applied while the glue dried.

When done:

And one last one:

(Yeah I had enough left over and the cutouts from the Captain America, so I freehanded a sort of Iron Man.  Not my favorite, but the kids recognized it as such, so that was that.)

Enjoy!  :D