Emma is a solicitor, DIY-lover and home owner who is always dabbling in creative design ideas for her home.
What do you get someone who has everything? I’m sure this is a question that faces all of us at least once a year around Christmas, and one that my husband and I were pondering as we walked around the Bryant Park market in NYC last December. Really, we were just there for the Max Brenner’s hot chocolate (it’s essentially liquid chocolate in a cup) and to soak up a bit of the Christmas spirit, not to do any serious shopping.
But we stumbled upon a store called Creative Letter Art and fell in love with their products. The name says it all: they sell photographs of objects that form letters and when arranged in a frame the end result is a word. Inspirational (love, hope, faith etc), names (first or family names), whatever the message you want to convey they will have letters to help you say it and a couple of themes to choose from (nature, urban, architecture, music etc). Curious? You can see some of their products here: http://creativeletterart.net/.
“Welcome” from Creative Letter Art
In any event, this serendipitous discovery helped us solve last year’s dilemma of what to get my uncle for Christmas. To make the gift a little more personal, we decided to take the pictures ourselves (although I have to admit to sneaking a peak at the Creative Letter Art website for some ideas!). Luckily, in New York we are spoiled with beautiful architecture from renaissance revival to art deco to contemporary.
So armed with our camera we went in search of pictures to make up the family name “STONE”. Once you’re attuned to it, it’s amazing how quickly your eye picks out the letters you are looking for: a clock becomes an “O”, an arched doorway a “N” or a streetlight a “T”. We took a couple of different pictures for each letter and, with a little help from Apple’s basic photo editing software, ended up with the ones below. The hardest part of this project was finding the frame.
As usual, we’d left the gift buying/making until the week before Christmas and finding a frame for 5 pictures was a challenge! After trying a couple of retailers and coming up empty handed, I resorted to Amazon (thank goodness for 2 day shipping!) and eventually found a frame that was long enough. We had to DIY the mount, as the one the frame came with was the wrong configuration, but all that was needed was black card and a craft knife and an engineer husband who undertakes every task with laser-like precision. Tip: finding a 4 picture frame is MUCH easier, so next time we might stick to 4 letter words!
We loved the final product and luckily so did my uncle!
– Emma
