Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Earth Bag Sign/Display Board



Tuesday Challenge: Cardboard
This is a sign/display board that I made for a friend. She and another of her friends started a business selling Earth Bags, which are basically heavy-duty shopping totes for people to use in lieu of the usual paper or plastic bags. They needed a sign to use at the local craft show being held at the Superior Dome this coming weekend, but neither of them were able to get it done. Sooo...they hired me to do it.

We were going to just use poster board to create it, but found a cardboard display board -- like the kind used for science fair projects -- that would work better. (And also serves more than one purpose for them. But I won't go into those details.) We also picked up some acrylic paint in two shades of brown, some glue (as I do in almost all of my projects, I used Aleene's Original Tacky Glue!), and some paint brushes. The rest of the stuff I used on the board are things I had around the house: black corrugated cardboard (which I had from when I was heavily into scrapbooking...then got bored with it) to put behind photos of their products and an abbreviated version of their mission statement (which I printed on some leftover letterhead paper I had laying around), and some string (which I have no clue why I have...other than it was in one of the boxes of my mom's stuff that my dad gave me after she passed away. I just don't know why I kept it for so long!). Oh...and some plain black paper that I also had from my scrapbooking days. That was used on the backside of the display board side flaps, just to cover up the board's manufacturer's printing and make it look a little nicer.

I won't go into detail about how much of a pain it was to get the logo and top border design transferred to the display board. Those details also include the reason behind why we couldn't just print their logo off of the computer. Let's just say it was a major headache, to say the least!

So after I got the logo and border penciled into place, I got down to business with the painting (not one of my strengths!). My friend was insistent on covering up as much of the board's "white space" as possible, so I came up with a plan to paint ALL of the "white space". (A surprise to my friend, and a pleasant one at that...much to my relief when I showed her the final product.) To begin with, I sponge-painted (with a sponge I had around the house) the flaps using both shades of brown. That was the EASY part! The hardest part was trying to paint (with crappy brushes by the way) the logo and border so it didn't look TOO sloppy. (Sloppier than it looks now that is.) Obviously, I used the darker brown on the border design at the top and the background for the logo design; the lighter brown for the logo design itself and the background for the top border.

Next came lots of glue: For adding the string to the "handle" of the logo, as well as for outlining the logo's lettering; plus attaching the black paper to the back of the flaps, and the black cardboard to the front of the flaps to serve as a background for the photos and mission statement (both of which I printed myself, as well as some business cards). I also did some outlining with a black Sharpie.

I added the photos and mission statement to the board (using straight pins I also had) to finish the sign/display...at 3:00am yesterday morning! And...WAH-LAH! There you have it: A sign for your Earth Bag (because you KNOW you just HAVE to buy one of those bags now)!

(WHEW! I never thought I'd finish typing! That's a lot of words from li'l ol' me lately!)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Very nice. Looks sort of like an African motif.
I bet they loved it.