Easy DIY Subway Art and My Biggest Craft Fail

As you all probably already know, we’re moving to a different duty station next week…my husband is in the Army and we’ve been here in North Carolina for the past 4 years which is forever in Army time! Last month I was hosting a farewell coffee for our family group leader who is also moving this month and I wanted to make a personalized Subway Art piece to remind her of her time here.  Easy right?

No.

It was horrible.  Literally my worst craft fail ever.  There were tears people.  It broke me. Twice.

Here was my first attempt, I cut out all of the stenciling with my Silhouette and it was a huge pain to get it all on there but I had high hopes at this point still:

Then I painted it and when I took the stencil off I was left with this:

This was the point at which my heart started pounding and I started panicking.  I frantically went online to my silhouette Facebook group and got a ton of suggestions for how to improve it so I quickly painted a second piece of wood with a base color so I could try again the next day.

The suggestions on round 2 helped-paint with the base color over the stencil first, then the letter color so it doesn’t bleed.  There was still some bleeding but I started meticulously touching it up by hand.

Then I took a step back to check out my work.

The ENTIRE thing was ever so slightly tilted to the right….all the words, everything.  Not gonna work.

At this point I realized that it wasn’t going to happen and if I didn’t want to lose my mind I needed to come up with a plan B…this gift was from our entire group so I felt a lot of pressure and I had really been in love with the design I had.

Enter Walgreens. {This is not a sponsored post by the way, Walgreens just saved my bootie in this situation and I wanted to share!}

Walgreens has SAME DAY canvas prints at a lot of their locations.  Boo-yah! I quickly headed over to PicMonkey and whipped a design up and two hours later it was in my hands-a HUGE weight off my shoulder! It was so last minute I didn’t even think to take a picture…but when my youngest son had his last appointment with his speech therapist before our move I knew I wanted to make the same gift again!

The only tricky part of creating the subway art is that Walgreens carries the edges of the print over the sides so you have to play with it a bit to make sure all your typography is on the front of the canvas.  I started by making an 11 by 14″ design in PicMonkey and made a template to see how it would look on the Walgreens website:

On the left is the image I created in PicMonkey, on the right is what that image looked like when I put it on the 11 by 14 canvas on the Walgreens site.  You can see that I had a sort of guide to figure out where to place my typography based on what parts of the numbers were showing up on the front of the canvas image.

After that I did a test run placing text where I thought it should go on the top and bottom and checking it on the Walgreens website.

Once I was sure I had the words placed properly I filled in the rest and erased the numbers. This was my final design:

And this is the final result from Walgreens-you’ll notice that there is an empty border on my canvas-they were out of the canvas size I had wanted when I went to pick it up so they had printed on a larger one so it skewed the way it came out and I didn’t have time to wait for them to stock back up…the first one I did (and forgot to take pictures of!) turned out perfectly so if you’re a procrastinator on a tight deadline like I was it could be useful to call the store and verify they have that size in stock before creating your art.

Also be sure to google “Walgreens” coupon before you place your order-you can usually always find at least one to apply to your order-I got both canvases I made for under $30 each! I think they make a great, personal gift!!

What has been your worst craft fail? I’d love to hear I’m not the only one who totally tanks a project every now and then!