Makeover - DIY Bus Blinds

November 03, 2014

I was planning to post the kitchen transformation this week but I need to do that when I've got more time to sit down and do it justice. So for now, carrying on with the hallway art theme I thought our DIY bus blinds would be more suitable for today. Apologies for the blurred out line, I need to keep a bit of privacy but you get the main idea. A couple of years ago I discovered bus blinds, personalised canvases in the style of old bus blinds {or the rotating name part of a bus' destination} and loved the idea of creating our own with all of our favourite places. There were these available on Not on the High Street but what crazy prices for such small canvases. So, with Ben's admirable can-do attitude we thought we'd make our own version for a total fraction of the price. 
The bus blinds started off like this.. We bought a roll of Canvas from eBay and painted it black, cutting it to the size required. In our case that meant big enough for Ikea's biggest frames.


We decided on our favourite place names, trying to vary it with street names as well as cities and even whole regions, postcodes and dates. The font used on the traditional bus blinds is called Johnston, downloadable for a fee here or this one that we used for free called London Tube Font.  Ben then designed on Microsoft Paint the layout, stretching the letters and working out from the length of words how big or small to make it. Play around and see what you like the look of. It's more interesting if you have some words stacked on top of each other or some slightly smaller. Then printing off on sheets of A4 paper we lined them up on the canvas and then painstakingly used them as a template for canvas to cut out. We used nail scissors. It took hours. We both regretted starting about two hours into it having done only a few lines. The smaller letters were the hardest. The cut-out A's and O's even harder. We had two huge sheets to do, hundreds of letters to cut out. It drove us crazy, our backs hurt from crouching over. We then had to line them up and stick the canvas letters on with blue tack, so fiddly! You'd stand back and realise a whole row was wonky and have to adjust. But, at the end of it we stood back and although close up there were a few straggly strings of canvas and not everything was 100% perfect, it looked good especially once in the frame with a mount around it. And we'd made it which was the main thing. 



So what I'm saying is, it was quite a time consuming, fiddly project but I'm so glad that we did it as now we have two big pieces of art work that's personal to us in the hallway and for the tiniest fraction of the cost of just one of those Not on the High street small canvases.



We get so many comments on them and people can't believe that we've made them. Until they look really up close at least. 




The only problem is that we've visited all the places on them now, we might need to make another one... 

R <3 xx 

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