Dictionary Art

I am so super pleased with this, so I wanted to share it with you.

Disclaimer: This is not an original idea. If you’re on Pinterest, then you already know that.

I’ve been eyeballing some dictionary art on Etsy, but to buy a set of eight unframed prints was going to cost around $65. I couldn’t bring myself to buy them, so I’d just visit them every once in a while on the internet.

Then I saw some decoupaging projects on Pinterest and my brain bulb blinked. I saw the project in my head and started gathering the things I might need to pull it off. I already had some cool dingbat fonts, and there’s been an old dictionary sitting in our basement for years. (By old, I mean 1986.) Then the wheels started turning.

I started by printing various images on dictionary pages. It felt a little rebellious to be pulling out dictionary pages, but for a book that doesn’t have the word “Internet” in it, or still lists Germany as separate East and West countries, I thought it would be okay.

Then I bought 8×10 canvases at Hobby Lobby for $2 each. (Or rather, they came two in a pack for $4.) I selected the pages I liked the most and trimmed them to fit. Then came the Mod Podging.

The bubbling of the pages worried me at first, but I just smoothed out the paper as best I could with my fingertips while they were dripping wet.

It worked marvelously.

I chose the dictionary pages with care. For example, I printed Tennessee on the page with “home” on it. On the R2D2 page is the word “boy” and the page with the ampersand is the word “us.”

Fun on a Ferris Wheel anyone?